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.

Best Games - Super Sprint There should be no world in which spinning a steering wheel as hard as you can and then grabbing it into a dead stop allows you drive a race car. The front wheels on your average car can only pivot over a small range before they become useless for actually turning. At speed this is even more true. Your steering wheel is nothing like the wheel of some pirates galleon it can’t actually turn a full 360. There would be no point to it and it would do nothing to help you with control of the vehicle or feel for the road. Super Sprint requires that you spin that wheel and get good at it.

I’m still thankful for the myriad array of wonderful games being created. I’m thankful for well told stories delivered in all the ways that it’s possible to tell them. I’m thankful for unprecedented access to excellent music and art.

After writing any story comes the second, less fun, but maybe more important part of the process. You have to reread it, edit it, and probably rewrite it. At least you will have to rewrite chunks of it. I posted a story last week that did a lot of what I was intending for it, but felt a little flat around the edges. I had created for myself the problem of writing distinct characters with little or no way to actually emote. There would be no “Jim felt” or “Lisa thought” in this story. There would be no ‘AI develops human personality’ in this story. Still, I very definitely wanted these cleaning bots to be distinct characters with their own motivations and personalities. If you get to the end of this story and you don’t know how :6b99 ’thinks’ or ‘feels’ and you don’t see how its personality is affected by the events of the story, then I have failed.

Just another small story that I wanted to shake out of my head. I had been wanting to write a story about characters from a very non human perspective for a while and found inspiration in some other work I was doing. The story follows, but it will also live over here. 

I’ve continued to slowly rework and refine Adventure Caddie, the once video game, now cooperative board game. Every time I make a major change to the rules I increment the version number so you can see that we are now on version 0.4 . I used to have dice. No more dice. I used to have a competitive version. No more competitive version. I used to have 3 different types of tokens. Now only one. As it gets simpler, I think that hopefully it gets better. I have yet to give it a major play test (with people who aren’t me or related to me), but I would have to assume that I will end up incriminating that number a few times after I set up one of those.

Best Games - Excitebike When you use a clutch on a motorcycle or manual transmission vehicle you have to get a feel for it. A clutch is not a switch that engages or releases instantly. There is a smooth gradient to the motion. You can feel the clutch gradually connect to the rotation of the engine and transfer that power to your tires. There is a point where the friction is enough to provide some motivation for the vehicle to move, but not so much that the engine can’t keep up and stalls out. That point is a balance that you can feel.