There's a button in iTunes today I haven't seen before.
"Download all previously purchased music"
So many forgotten moods and guilty pleasures.
Now playing: the live recording of "Tomorrow, Wendy", by Concrete Blond.
"Download all previously purchased music"
So many forgotten moods and guilty pleasures.
Now playing: the live recording of "Tomorrow, Wendy", by Concrete Blond.
I've joined a secret society. The secret society of people who have bar codes. That's what it feels like anyway. We're te people for whom a bunch of lines become code numbers. It's powerful alchemy.
Had to know it would happen. I was showing the game off at Penny Arcade eXpo, and someone who works for Wizards of the Coast now wants to hire Marek (the primary artist). It's not uncommon for WotC to pay ten times what Marek has been charging me per card. Which you can afford to do when you print Magic: the Gathering and have millions of customers worldwide. Good thing the art is almost finished. There's no way I'll be able to match that.
Congrats to Marek. He deserves it.
Congrats to Marek. He deserves it.
Lyssan is about to move into its next stage of life as a game. The final hours are ticking away on it's kickstarter fundraising/preorder round. Once those are up, bankers do things, weeks pass, money appears, and I get to do the final round of haggling with printers to see how many copies can be made to appear on my doorstep for the amount of real money that appeared in my bank account.
Then art gets handed over to the printer. They reject it because it's too black or too magenta or the margins aren't wide enough in this one spot. We go back and forth for weeks, until everything's just so. And then they get all the money and I wait until early next year when a shipping container appears on the Oakland docks from Germany or China, half full of someone else's stuff and half full of my brand new game. Finally with all the art in. Finally beautiful. Finally all there.
Those pallets o' games come home with me in a UHaul, and somehow we get them up the stairs. They take up half the loft. I lure friends over with promises of wine and cheese and we spend the night catching up over those as we box up some 350 copies of the game to the kickstarter supporters. More go out to Alliance Games and ADC, who will sell them in turn to the mom & pop game stores across the country.
That's the view from here. Finger's crossed.
P.S. The first video review of Lyssan is up! Lance "Undead Viking" Myxter has done a half-hour expose on Lyssan. His conclusion? This is a game for people who like digging in for heavy strategy and backstabbing their friends. For that player, Lyssan is an "instant classic". His words.
Then art gets handed over to the printer. They reject it because it's too black or too magenta or the margins aren't wide enough in this one spot. We go back and forth for weeks, until everything's just so. And then they get all the money and I wait until early next year when a shipping container appears on the Oakland docks from Germany or China, half full of someone else's stuff and half full of my brand new game. Finally with all the art in. Finally beautiful. Finally all there.
Those pallets o' games come home with me in a UHaul, and somehow we get them up the stairs. They take up half the loft. I lure friends over with promises of wine and cheese and we spend the night catching up over those as we box up some 350 copies of the game to the kickstarter supporters. More go out to Alliance Games and ADC, who will sell them in turn to the mom & pop game stores across the country.
That's the view from here. Finger's crossed.
P.S. The first video review of Lyssan is up! Lance "Undead Viking" Myxter has done a half-hour expose on Lyssan. His conclusion? This is a game for people who like digging in for heavy strategy and backstabbing their friends. For that player, Lyssan is an "instant classic". His words.
Again with the movie trailers that caught my eye:
I'm hoping to see more from the movie than "Rich people are evil. Poor people deserve more." Which is mostly what the trailer shows.
The notion of time as money is believable, and worth exploring. There's already so much linkage between the two. And if immortality was available, what else would make sense as a currency? This world can only support so many people. You want to keep being one of them? Earn it. When you think of children in this world, it becomes especially poignant. In order to bring a child into the world, someone would have to sponsor it, giving it some of the the life time allotted to them.
And if movies where people have clocks in their arms is your cup of tea, let me also recommend Timer. It's that rare creature, the sci-fi RomCom. It's available on NetFlix instant. And it's worth your time.
I'm hoping to see more from the movie than "Rich people are evil. Poor people deserve more." Which is mostly what the trailer shows.
The notion of time as money is believable, and worth exploring. There's already so much linkage between the two. And if immortality was available, what else would make sense as a currency? This world can only support so many people. You want to keep being one of them? Earn it. When you think of children in this world, it becomes especially poignant. In order to bring a child into the world, someone would have to sponsor it, giving it some of the the life time allotted to them.
And if movies where people have clocks in their arms is your cup of tea, let me also recommend Timer. It's that rare creature, the sci-fi RomCom. It's available on NetFlix instant. And it's worth your time.
Things that are looking good for Lyssan.
- Drakkenstrike tells me they're working on their review for the game now. They've got one of the most watched game review channels on YouTube.
- A first foreign company has approached me about rights to distribute Lyssan in their country/language.
- We're getting covered in Polish? English, too. Like, the kind that people from England speak.
This is worth your 15 minutes:
Short version: Massive amounts of money are now being entrusted to AIs. (e.g. on the stock market) Because the contest between AIs has real world consequences, we give the AIs what they need. That could mean dynamiting a new tunnel across hundreds of miles to link New York to Chicago, (which already happened) hollowing out whole skyscrapers in the centers of metro areas to become computing cores, (which is happening now) or building platforms in the middle of the ocean (as the speaker predicts).
Short version: Massive amounts of money are now being entrusted to AIs. (e.g. on the stock market) Because the contest between AIs has real world consequences, we give the AIs what they need. That could mean dynamiting a new tunnel across hundreds of miles to link New York to Chicago, (which already happened) hollowing out whole skyscrapers in the centers of metro areas to become computing cores, (which is happening now) or building platforms in the middle of the ocean (as the speaker predicts).
Movie trailers that caught my eye
Both of these are TRUE STORIES. It says so right on their websites.
Both of these are TRUE STORIES. It says so right on their websites.
Holy crap. I'm a game designer. I mean, I know. You know. I know you know. But I mean.. I spent all of today, every last minute from waking up until writing these words before crashing out, doing a game design related thing.
I opened my eyes, sat up, popped open the laptop next to the bed, and started responding to kickstarter and boardgamegeek messages about my game. Along the way I noticed that James Raggi of Lamentations of the Flame Princess was calling for scenario submissions for his game - a re-imagining of 1st edition Dungeons and Dragons. That lead to an eMail exchange with ZakSabbath to see how he felt about my dusting off one of our discussions of a scenario for his I Hit It With My Axe campaign and getting it up to snuff for publication. I was a couple hours into writing that up to send to Raggi when another friend showed up with a prototype of his own. We played that for hours, tweaking it with a rules change or two after each iteration. He left and it was back to writing draft-0 notes for the roleplaying scenario.
OK, there was half an hour out where I went over to take care of another friend's dog while she was out of town. And I may have showered as some point. I forget.
In unrelated news:
My favorite quote in recent weeks: "That's the guest squid."
Which one of my friends said to me. Literally. As in, "That squid is for your use as a guest in our house."
And I haven't yet made time to watch the new, final Potter movie. That needs to change, and soon.
I opened my eyes, sat up, popped open the laptop next to the bed, and started responding to kickstarter and boardgamegeek messages about my game. Along the way I noticed that James Raggi of Lamentations of the Flame Princess was calling for scenario submissions for his game - a re-imagining of 1st edition Dungeons and Dragons. That lead to an eMail exchange with ZakSabbath to see how he felt about my dusting off one of our discussions of a scenario for his I Hit It With My Axe campaign and getting it up to snuff for publication. I was a couple hours into writing that up to send to Raggi when another friend showed up with a prototype of his own. We played that for hours, tweaking it with a rules change or two after each iteration. He left and it was back to writing draft-0 notes for the roleplaying scenario.
OK, there was half an hour out where I went over to take care of another friend's dog while she was out of town. And I may have showered as some point. I forget.
In unrelated news:
My favorite quote in recent weeks: "That's the guest squid."
Which one of my friends said to me. Literally. As in, "That squid is for your use as a guest in our house."
And I haven't yet made time to watch the new, final Potter movie. That needs to change, and soon.
Thing I learned in Bookbinding 1, Day 1:
There was a time when books would go from press to binder with the pages all folded up from larger sheets, still connected at the top, and then be bound that way. A gentleman might sit in his chair with a new book and a knife to slice the pages open with, knowing that he was the first to ever read it.
The bookbinders were largely illiterate until the last century or two. Anyone skilled enough to read would more likely work the press themselves, where they could proof the work.
That readers might buy the folded sheets from the printer unbound, and take them to their preferred binder, so that all the volumes in their library might match, having been done by the same craftsman.
That while Gutenberg may have invented the printing press in 1440, but it was little more than a century ago before the first machine to automate the stitching of the binding finally arrived. For more than 400 years after the press was mechanized, the binding remained manual labor.
....and aside from all those factoids, I must say that bookbinding has been a lovely vacation for the day. I'd signed up for it as anything but a vacation, since the skillset and tools for making game boards is the same as the ones used to craft hardback book covers. But each step of the process is one I can zen out to. Lining up the folios. Coating the thread wax. Punching the sections. Any task is relaxing when it's novel, yet repetitive, and not on a deadline. But this one taps into a childhood reverence for paper and craft. It was a happy day.
There was a time when books would go from press to binder with the pages all folded up from larger sheets, still connected at the top, and then be bound that way. A gentleman might sit in his chair with a new book and a knife to slice the pages open with, knowing that he was the first to ever read it.
The bookbinders were largely illiterate until the last century or two. Anyone skilled enough to read would more likely work the press themselves, where they could proof the work.
That readers might buy the folded sheets from the printer unbound, and take them to their preferred binder, so that all the volumes in their library might match, having been done by the same craftsman.
That while Gutenberg may have invented the printing press in 1440, but it was little more than a century ago before the first machine to automate the stitching of the binding finally arrived. For more than 400 years after the press was mechanized, the binding remained manual labor.
....and aside from all those factoids, I must say that bookbinding has been a lovely vacation for the day. I'd signed up for it as anything but a vacation, since the skillset and tools for making game boards is the same as the ones used to craft hardback book covers. But each step of the process is one I can zen out to. Lining up the folios. Coating the thread wax. Punching the sections. Any task is relaxing when it's novel, yet repetitive, and not on a deadline. But this one taps into a childhood reverence for paper and craft. It was a happy day.
