Category: Human Contact

Some Fine Gentlemen Play A Friendly Game

Alex Drummond just sent me this sketch of some fine, respectable gentlemen playing a friendly game of Kodrek. He also sent me some earlier roughs:

Gotta say, I’m pretty excited.

I’m doing preliminary flows of the text of the game into an InDesign file right now. I sure wish style importing was more smarter.

Human Contact draft 2 is Done

I’m excited to say that Human Contact Draft 2 is now up for download on the playtester’s forum!

If you’ve playtested Human Contact before or backed the project at Kickstarter, I’d love to have you in the playtester group! I’ll be looking for feedback on the readability and playability of the text by January 1st, and if you can put together a group — especially a group that can play multiple chapters — before then, I’ll be very, very happy.

Gioconomicon interviews me through Giullina at Lucca

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fwjzkoHhGCc&feature=player_embedded

From the beginning of the article:

Joshua A.C. Newman is a real character, committed to the strangest and most diverse things (what relationship do you see between sculpture, the construction of aerial drones, and ancient poetry, to name a few?)

You can read the English translation of the summary article here.

Thanks to Giullina for translating for me. She’s an amazing interpreter, and I had an amazing time at Lucca Comics and Games. I hope I get to go back someday.

One Day Left to Support Human Contact!

The Human Contact Kickstarter has just one day left. Thanks to you 200+ funders (and special thanks to the first hundred, to whom I really owe a debt of gratitude for getting the ball so dramatically rolling), it’s over 300% funded. Human Contact will now go into submarine mode, taking onboard only the project’s backers. I’ve got a whole lot of writing to do and will only be posting abstractly and distractedly as I generate drafts and get sketches from Alex.

If you want to keep up with the project, donate at any of the listed levels and you’ll get project updates as they come, including playable drafts, early sketches, and probably a few extras. I’ll be putting out a call for playtests to backers and, if you want to collide some cultures before March of next year, this is the way to do it.

I also have to get on making those Kodrek boards. I was expecting to have to make two. Instead, I have to make 14. That interest has made me start to think about publishing it as its own thing in the future. Boardgame publishing is hard, but I’ve seen some real successes among my indie peers and I think I can make it happen.

Kickstart Update: Human Contact is funded in its first day!

At 11:57 last night, the Human Contact Kickstart was fully funded at $2400! That’s 15 hours, and it’s still going strong! I woke up this morning to find a larger list of Kodrek boards to make and several more copies of the book to send out. But I also discovered something else: you’ve put Human Contact on the front of the Discover page at Kickstarter, under Most Popular! As of this writing, at 8:00 this morning, Human Contact the sixth most popular project! (I imagine that’s a measure of something like “backings per hour”.) The projects ahead of it on that list are really amazing, and they’ve got great videos, so moving up will be hard, but I’d like to be in sight of that cool iPhone tripod mount and that amazing comic for a good while. And I think maybe we can pass the “I’m Not A Hipster” book that’s ahead of us to take spot #5. To be frank, the number of people wanting to prove that they’re not hipsters is very high, so it could be a fight. Plus, the graphic design is good.

So, OK! Objective #1 achieved! Thank you all! Objective #2 is next: a posting on a major geek blog. I can’t do that — the biggest geek blog I post on is my own — but maybe you can! So far, most of my backers are only one social network hop away (we used to call those “friends” and “relatives”), with a few people over the horizon another step away who got in early because they were excited about something their node-neighbors were excited about. But I’d love it if you could help spread the word further.

$2400 buys the project a shoestring. Help me get it some stout, sea-worthy cable!

Make Human Contact!

The Human Contact Kickstart is live! For the next 30 days, you can donate to the project to make it happen. If you help me reach my goal of $2400, it means I’ll be able to print the game book with the high production values that allow me to realize my vision for the book, and you’ll get a copy of the game.

Human Contact uses a version of the Shock: Social Science Fiction game rules, specifically focused for high-intensity meetings (and clashes) between cultures. It uses Transhumanist ideas and hard science as a backdrop for anthropological science fiction. (If you want to know more, ask in the comments or check out the Human Contact page!)

Every donor past $10 gets prerelease PDFs up through the final, and there are 25 hardcopies of the book at $25 for the first people to donate at that level. At the top donation level, $100 or more, I’ll also hand-make you a Kodrek boardgame set, complete with the ludo/anthropological study about the game! It’s a quick-playing, chess-like game of dirty, backstabbing space combat from a culture created with Human Contact.

Pass the word along to anyone who likes science fiction or roleplaying games! Tweet and post to Facebook with the hashtag #humancontact, and help me make this book real!

Marain — the Alphabet of the Culture

Daniel Solis' Marain font, as though brushedLook what Daniel Solis did! It’s a font of the brush version of Marain, the language used by The Culture!

This is what Marain looks like when it’s not brushed:

I’m particularly excited about this as I’m working on the Languages chapter of Human Contact right now. I’ve got all the parts for Kepho-Rn, the language of the Academy, in place, and I’m writing the systems for making new languages and dialects. It’s a damn good time.