The Global Game Jam was this past weekend. And I didn’t participate. Because I was doing this writing jam. A jam is a jam though. One of the major parts of a jam is that you are given a prompt, or a bunch of prompts and what you make from those prompts will be anyone’s guess. I have done a lot of jams by now and I have a few rules for dealing with prompts. It turns out, for me at least, the rules are the same if I am jamming on a game or jamming on some writing. I’ll drop some of them here.

The writing competition I am in adheres to a very strict, very tight, word count. It’s pretty easy to blow past that limit and have to walk everything back, one word at a time. I managed to wrestle it down. This time. I have found this practice of hitting certain word counts really supercharges my editing. When you are looking for more concise ways to word things, you also find better ways to make an impact. Better ways to get to a certain feeling or vibe. You can’t count on long, flowery, descriptions. You need to get to the heart of what you are trying to say, quickly and efficiently. I have found that this practice had the effect of making me more aggressive when editing, even when I didn’t need to hit a specific limit. My current stories are more compact. I don’t know that this will work for everyone, but just like doing a lot of reps can strengthen your muscles, a lot of editing makes you better at editing. If you are looking to improve your writing, I fully recommend joining a similar competition or jam.

I’m doing another one of those writing contest things. Writing very short stories every weekend for at least a little while. I’ve only just started, so I don’t really have much to say about it yet.

Best Games - Full Throttle The early to mid 90s, point and click adventure games were the hot genre. I mean, sure, there were lots of other types of games out there. Sports games were just ramping up and up. But point and click adventure games were really pushing the whole medium forward. If there was a new technology, point and click adventures had the budget to take advantage of it. CD-ROM, point and click adventure games. Broad color palettes, point and click adventure games. Full motion video, voice acting, character animation, dynamic soundtracks, digital recording. All point and click adventure games.

I hope everyone is having a happy holiday.

I would bet that everyone who writes fiction has some basic rules that they follow. Probably, a lot of them are rules learned from courses or instructional books on writing. At least a few of them will be something the writer came up with themselves. Some might even be unconscious or at least unvoiced directives.

I don’t have much to write for this one. I thought about writing some stuff about the games I’m working on, but none of that is in a place to talk about.

Well, I signed up for the weekend story writing competition again. It’s not for a few weeks, so I have time to back out if I want to. I did consider that, instead of writing new stories for the contest, I would still block out that time for writing, but I would go back to some older stories that need a punch up. Try to finish more of them. Maybe even send them out and try to get them published. That seems like what I should do with these stories, right?

Best Games - Cannon Fodder Do you know Jools and Jops. Do you know Stoo and RJ. If you do, it’s probably time for you to get some annual bloodwork done.

Making graphics for games is a bottomless task. No matter how deep you dig, you will always find more. More to learn. More tools, more tasks, more ways to build, and more ways to screw up.

I was going to write something about game dev and making graphics for games and how there are so many layers and intermeshing systems at work that it’s amazing anything ever gets made. I stashed that post for a later date.

I like working with fonts. That should probably come as no surprise. I was, after all, a designer of signs and posters and banners, etc. for years. Working with fonts is a big part of the job. Learning and relearning the rules of shape, and spacing, and balance. Learning them and then breaking them. Fonts are one of the actually fun parts of design work.

Best Games - Command & Conquer In the mid to late 90s, if you were playing games on a PC you probably played some Real Time Strategy games. They were the in thing. The fresh new genre. We had been playing action games, and role playing games, but the RTS genre was the first to be designed exclusively around a flashy new control device. The mouse.

I have been using obsidian for notes and writing for a couple of months now. I’m surprised. Normally, when I’m using a tool like this, I would have found all sorts of limitations and problems by now. Something that would annoy me enough, or prove inconvenient enough that I would just stop using it. I haven’t, not so far anyway.

I have been following Formula 1 pretty casually for a decade or so. I’m a fan, but not really a super dedicated one. I usually watch the highlights, check the championship standings, follow some of the driver drama. I don’t really have any specific team or driver that I cheer for. I just like to see some good racing. It’s rare that I watch a whole race, but this weekend I did.