https://globalgamejam.org/2019/games/my-neighbour-vampire More than 46,000 people in 114 countries got together to make games this weekend. I was one of them. Over the past 9 years I have joined up with teams and filled all different rolls. I have made 3D models, painted textures, drawn concepts, and programmed game features. I think this is the first time I only focused on one task. This year I drew and painted portraits.
Still going here. I sort of bounced around and broke some stuff and then left the end pretty busted too. Sometimes you need to write really loose and bad for a bit and then put it back together later. Hopefully.
A small amount of movement over here. I was getting hung up on a scene so I jumped ahead and wrote some of the stuff after it. That leaves a big ‘write this here’ hole so I only included all the new stuff that actually makes sense to the continuity. As always, I have to issue this warning. This is an in progress rough draft of something that will likely be novella length. If you have ever wanted to read and comment on a story while it’s being written, please be my guest. If you would rather wait until I have something that works from end to end and I have done at least some polish work on it, stay tuned and I will let you know.
Best Games - Marble Madness Marble Madness is a game that probably shouldn’t exist. I mean, obviously it does. People made it. The odds are pretty good Mark Cerny and Bob Flanagan made it sometime before it’s release, in 1984. At least that is what history says. Even playing it today, it’s hard to imagine some form of time travel wasn’t involved.
A small amount of movement over here. It’s New Years eve, so I suppose I will have to resolve to finish some more stories next year.
It’s Christmas Eve. If you stopped by here to read something new, maybe just go enjoy spending time with your family instead. If you don’t celebrate Christmas, go enjoy any of the other excellent solstice adjacent holidays. I’ll bet there will be food. Lots of really good food. Enjoy that. I’ll keep writing and have some new stuff for you next week.
still banging away in the word mines over here. Hard to believe that I have been writing here, once a week, for over 6 years. I started a blog to describe game development, then I expanded that to writing about games and other things on a regular schedule just to practice writing. One day another game developer suggested participating in NaNoWriMo and I was baffled. I mean I was writing every week, but writing a novel would mean writing fiction and that wasn’t what I did. He might as well have said ‘You drive a car. Why don’t you fly this jet.’ In my mind the two could not have been more distant. Now I have 8 small stories on my site (about a dozen more that never made it that far) and another thing that started as a short story but is nearing the end of ’episode 1’ and couldn’t fairly be called short. Every new page of words still feels like a genuine effort to string together, but I haven’t grown weary of it. I can feel some incremental improvement, but I still don’t think that I am done practicing. Maybe after an even dozen years I’ll feel like I know how to write. I doubt it. Until then, I’ll see if I can write something that I think other people might want to read.
More progress here. I thought that I was about 3 scenes from the end of part one, but realized that the story needed 2 more. I will also be extending and expanding at least 2 of the scenes from chapter one. I also realized that while I have chapter and scene breaks in my working copy, the version I post up on the site is one long chunk of text. I think it is growing past the point where reading something like that is practical or enjoyable. I’ll make some revisions next week to split that stuff up, and I think I’ll start posting an epub version that people can download to phones or e-readers. I don’t expect many people will, but I have a few ideas about how I would like to release these stories that mean I should get used to exporting common formats.
For the next few weeks, I’m only going to work on this story here to try to get part 1 all wrapped up. Then I will edit and revise part one and start stitching the chunks of part 2 that I have written into something that works. It’s sort of funny the sorts of things that you don’t even know a scene is missing until you write the things that follow them up. There are a few descriptions and conversations that I need to tie back into part 1 here to sell stuff further down the road. The one positives of writing something like this more or less in public is that I have to break myself of ever finding any one scene or line too precious. The second I post it up, a lot of it isn’t mine anymore, if that makes any sense. The previous warnings stand; you can read it if you want, but things are likely to change when editing happens. On the other hand, if you do read it, you can tell me what you like, or more importantly what you don’t like and I can add that too the list of things that will get looked at and revised when I go back over it.
Best Games - Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis - The opening credits The exact second that video games became a lucrative artform, someone signed a movie tie in deal. Video games became a vehicle to advertise. Movies, TV shows, toys, candy, rock bands, clothing brands, and fast food restaurants all have video game tie ins. The overwhelming majority of them are terrible.
progress continues over here. progress will continue at least until I have the first episode completed. My best estimates are that is about 5000 words or so away. Then I can get into some scenes I really want to write in episode 2 and 3!
I can’t remember a time when I didn’t read comics. I know there were a few early years there when I didn’t read at all, but as soon as I could sound out words, I was reading comics.
Best Games - Doom Doom is probably in the top ten on lists of the most popular video games of all time. You don’t have to check, I already did and it is. That means that if you are reading this you have almost certainly heard of Doom. There is a fair to good chance you have played Doom. Quite a few of you have played a lot of Doom and you might have played it on a lot of different hardware using a variety of input devices. You might have played a modded version of Doom with new graphics and sounds stolen directly from your favourite franchises. You may have played Doom clones that felt so similar but so very different.
There are some rough spots, and there are a couple of details left to paint but I think they came together in the end. Next week it will be back to writing around here.
Current mood: discouraged Glue failed pretty spectacularly. It's okay though. I have a plan to fix it.