This is where I would usually post part of a story I’m working on. Since it seems I can’t do that if I ever want to sell the thing, instead I will write this short blurb.

Best Games - Gunblade NY Some games just fill their niche perfectly. Simple, concise. No extraneous bits. Gunblade NY is built to a spec. You want a shooting game. How about if you never have to stop shooting. You want an action game. Gunblade never lets up. You want a short game you can enjoy for a few moments in an arcade or bar. Gunblade is only minutes long. You want to play with a friend. The game expects that you will.

This weekend was the Alberta Game Jam. You know what I did. I didn’t do the Alberta Game Jam. I thought about it. I registered for it. I forgot about it. I noticed a message about it a few hours before it was going to start. I watched the theme reveal. I got an idea for a game I could work on. Then I didn’t.

Best Games - Bushido Blade One perfect stroke. Perfectly timed. Perfectly executed. That is what we are told wins a sword fight. I don’t know about you, but I don’t ever plan on being in a sword fight. It seems dangerous. All ,like, sharp and whatnot. Stabby. I’ll be content with sword fights of the virtual kind.

Almost

This is a breakdown of my process on this painting so far. First I start with a sketch. I wanted to create a tall, inline composition for this one. Something that looked powerful and imposing, but with bright, rich colors.

You have to start somewhere. For a while I have been doing concept paintings based on the game I am making. This is the sort of thing that might typically be done before any game assets get made or early in development. Since I am the one doing all the work on this game at the moment I’ll do it in whatever order I damn well please. In this case that means I have set up a sort of feedback loop. The stuff I do in the game informs the paintings and vice versa. It’s a nonlinear workflow.

Roaring cars collide Shattered fragments fill the air You do it again ​

I’m just going to write this one as an aside. A little something that isn’t what I am really writing. What I am really writing is another short story, but I have recently found out that if you actually want to get short stories published in places where people might read them you can’t post them on your own personal blog. Now I understand the initial reasoning behind that. A publisher doesn’t want to pay money for a story that can be found for free on the internet. I also think that sort of thinking ignores the realities of the internet. Almost anything can be had for free if you are willing to look around for it. Text is especially susceptible to being copied and redistributed. The other reality is that people are pretty lazy. The types of magazines and web sites that might publish one of my stories are probably safe. People aren’t hunting around for pirated sci-fi stories. They are going to the outlets that they know. The places that curate stories. They are either listening to the ad sponsored podcast versions of stories, or paying a small amount for the digital subscription, or reading off the ad sponsored web page. That a story exists on my blog, a blog that very few people read, it won’t really factor into their bottom line. Even if it were the blog of a very popular writer, there would likely be very little impact to a publisher.

Best Games - Trial Bike Imagine that all of the controls for a game exist on two axes. Up, down, backward, forward. That’s it. That’s all. I mean, Pac-Man manages to operate on only two axes, so maybe it isn’t that difficult to imagine. Now, how many games can you think of that both only use two axes for input and sparked a decades spanning franchise. A franchise that remains successful to this day? It’s probably only Pac-Man and Trial Bike, or Trials, as the series would come to be known.

Two weeks ago I posted up a painting. This is one of a series of concept paintings that I have been doing for my game. The aim with all of these paintings has been to create a sort of 70’s album cover aesthetic. The sort of fantasy art that would have been printed on 12 inch vinyls. While I could have tried to just straight up copy the style of someone like Roger Dean, that would never have felt like something that I would actually paint. Instead, I started shifting whatever my own style is in the general direction of 70’s fantasy art.

Best Games - Death Rally This post is not really about a game. I mean, don’t get me wrong, Death Rally is great. It’s as much fun now as it was when it launched as an Apogee published shareware title 25 years ago. This post is about first steps.

First, write something. I write a lot here about games. I write here about game development. I write about art. I sometimes even write about movies. I write about all of these things, and even though I have been writing about them for about ten years, I never really write about something I spend a lot of my time doing. Writing.

I think I finally finished editing one of my stories. Kara’s Spine is a short, near future, sci if story about an elite athlete who receives a life changing surgery. I did a few rounds of edits and improvements on it over the last few weeks. A huge thank you goes out to the beta readers who helped me find places to revise and improve it. They know who they are. It might not be perfect, but I think it turned out alright. If you send me a note I can tell you were to read it and let me know what you think. Good or bad.