You probably know already, but Vincent Baker of Lumpley Games (Dogs in the Vineyard, Kill Puppies for Satan, Mechaton, and others) has started a forum about God, Sex, and RPGs, and now Food. It’s called I Would Knife Fight a Man. Come join the fun!
Da Zdravstvuyet Sozdanny Voley Narodov
Last night, I got to tag along on an interview between Voice of the Revolution, the indie press weekly podcast by the venerable Paul Tevis and Brennan Taylor. Emily Care Boss of Breaking the Ice and Shooting the Moon fame talked a bit about her upcoming game Sign In Stranger, I talked a little bit about why Shock: and Under the Bed are the way it is, and we talked about what it’s like to live in the hotbed of indie game publishing in which we live. It was a fun little spot to do. Thanks, Paul and Brennan, for the interview!
I’ll let you know when it’s posted.
The Gamestas Make Good
Hey, remember back in the Times of Sun when the Gamestas interviewed me? Well, their computers were destroyed in the Eighth Great Invasion, but in the Thousand Years Rebuilding, the archives were uncovered and the archivist Mel Um Tuwwu has put his findings up on the Gamestas site. Listen and enjoy! I don’t sound nearly as much like an asshole as I thought at the time!
On Beards and Bearding
I have a ritual. It goes like this.
At Thanksgiving, I shave one last time for the year so I look nice when the family’s together. That way, I’ve got a beard by the time ice can form on it.
On the first day it’s above freezing all day, I shave into whatever I want. Sometimes, that’s small sideburns, but usually, it’s big, Victorian ones that make me look at home wearing goggles, welding gloves, and overalls.
According to weather.com, that day will be Tuesday. And now comes the sad part: I’m going to be wicked fucking busy this week. I’m not even going to have time to go for a bikeride unless I do some self-delusion about the four clients I’m juggling this week. But when these projects are done, I’ll have money to get my bikes awesome. One’s to be a road bike convert and the other one’s a most impressive mountain bike built originally by my friend Daniel. One’s for going out the front of the driveway, the other out the back.
So I’m going to disappear for a couple of days. I’ll be back with work done and bike pics to show after the 19th.
Shock: Proton Pump
Check out this article in Nature that posits that limb regeneration may be a surprisingly simple technical matter. This is real fountain of youth stuff; anything that doesn’t kill you outright could be regrown so long as scar tissue doesn’t form and there’s sufficient time to regrow a body part — any body part — before you die.
What kind of society might this form? One addicted to risk for trivial reasons, one where fear of nonfatal wounds is considered cowardice or neurosis? One where fear is abolished altogether? One where it’s witheld except for those in risky occupations, leading to an age of exploration?
And what about regrowing parts of a brain? How would that affect who you are?
There’s a lot of fun to be found in this one.
(Thanks to Mycoplasm Twitch, the Man of Tomorrow for the link.)
Encouragement and Warning
Well, my taxes are done. And with that tax-doing came some very good news: I grossed about $4000 in my publishing venture last year. That’s about 27% of my total gross income, which doesn’t say much about my income as a graphic designer. But the warning I wish to impart with this doesn’t have to do with the ideal of living the carefree life of a freelance graphic designer. It has to do with the ideal of living the carefree life of a game designer.
Paul Czege said it over on The Full Text Abduction of Paul Czege very well back in August: there’s an “overjustification effect” when you receive a reward for doing something you already like to do. The danger is, when that reward is removed, you’ll stop doing it, even if, were there no reward to begin with, you’d have enjoyed it and continued to do it.
I say this in particular to those who are thinking about hatching their first fully developed game for Gen Con this year. I say this in particular particular to Julia, who has a real hottie of a game in the form of Steal Away Jordan and I want to make sure that she doesn’t get so seduced by the money that she stops writing and playing if the money becomes unsatisfying in a year or two.
Now, I should say: Paul and I have rather different views on this. My family has always made money doing what we’re best at doing and, even though the money has sometimes sucked, we’ve done it anyway, refining things so that we wouldn’t starve and so our crafts would get better. So my feeling is, you find the thing that you like the most that can make you money, and you do that. I wish I could say it always worked, but I’m pretty sure the other ways don’t work much better. (i.e. find something you like that doesn’t make you money, find something you don’t like that does get you money, or find something you don’t like that also doesn’t get you money.)
But the point stands: if making lots of money is one of your goals (say, achieving $10k a year on game publishing — a practical but high goal in our circles) while making something you really like, and the money will keep you from enjoying what you’re doing if it’s not good enough then please reconsider. Lots of peoples’ games don’t succeed financially. Lots of folks break even. Some don’t even do that (and I wouldn’t recommend continuing on if that’s the case; you need to change something if you’re not making back your investment). If you’re happy breaking even by publishing ten copies of your game, the do that. It’s low-risk, it’s fun, and you get to see how the world works.
But some last minute encouragement: I went to my first Gen Con with 100 copies of Under the Bed: The Game of Child Endandgerment And Accidentally Saying Very Personal Things and broke even the following Wednesday. If I can do it, so can you. Just be prepared to remind yourself that you love what you’re doing. If it turns out that the market suddenly shrinks next year, you want to be able to go back to your friends and still play every Thursday evening, not become soured on the whole thing.
If you’re working on publishing a game, what is it? Why do you love it?
P.S. That graph at the top isn’t my actual income graph. It’s a graph of President George W. Bush’s disapproval ratings from Wikipedia. See when it goes down suddenly? That’s 9/11. See how it immediately starts to rise? That’s him being an awful, tyrannical overlord. This is from last June, when his disapproval was in the mid-60%. Now he can’t get half of Texas to like him.
Spacecraft from Mechaton
A few weeks back, Emily, Vincent and I got together to battle in the space over Tarkut. At issue was a communications satellite held by Emily’s Rasili Empire. Through it, any one of us could command the communications of the entire planet for propaganda purposes. Vincent made a big threat early on: “I’m gonna keep you from getting that satellite no matter what.” I took that to heart. I also realized that I wasn’t going to be able to fight off both of them, cuz they were both going to be gunning for me. So I started my setup with one guy out front to make Vincent think I was going to be fighting for the satellite, which got him good and committed. I placed the rest of my guys behind him. The look on both of our faces is Vincent going “Holy shit, how am I gonna pull this out?” and me thinking, “Have I just made a terrible strategic error?
Vincent didn’t pull it out. I didn’t win, but I got close, and in the Campaign rules, that counts for something. Next game, Vincent’s gotta be gunning for Emily again. I may find myself an ally. We’ll see.
In any event, I had three new models for this game. Here they are.
The Shuttle. This came up from a remote launch point in the desert outside Tarkut. It was supplied by our mysterious benefactor.
The deep space craft. We hijacked this old piece of shit and use it to haul mecha around orbit.
The only purpose-built space mecha among the Paktali. It was on artillery duty.
So there they are. We’re planning up another battle for the near future. Keep yourself appraised of actual events in the ongoing Battle of Tarkut here, or read scandalous propaganda over at Anyway.
Kenneth Hite Gives Props
Kenneth Hite, respected RPG reviewer, author, designer, and editor just gave me some big props over on his livejournal, the Prince of Cairo.
Says Kenneth:
… like The Mountain Witch, this book is a triumph of Joshua Newman’s design, which somehow manages to combine occasional bold-face, sidebar/footnotes, and ragged-right margins into a clean, evocative look that is appropriately “Japanese” without being Orientalist or fey.
What’s particularly nice about this is that one of my design goals was to explicitly avoid Orientalist, Legend of Five Rings stereotypes and draw from my love of actual Japanese art.
Lots of this:
and a little bit of this:
And Kenneth was nice enough to notice.
Thanks, Kenneth!
In Sweden, They Don’t Care Who You Know.
Wow. Look at the company I get in with these days! That’s a page I’m damned proud to be on.
Also, there’s an interesting thread about the Singularity going on over at RPGnet. Check it out before it devolves into namecalling!
10,191
Hey, the glyphpress just passed 10,191 visits! Thanks, everyone, for making this independent publishing venture so worth it! Thanks for your funny and insightful comments, thanks for your thoughtful reading, and thanks for the enthusiastic play and commentary on Shock: and Under the Bed that will make them stronger games in the future. Thanks you, readers who came here looking for pictures of Lego mecha. Thank you, readers who came here looking for my games. Thank you, readers who came here looking for me. And thank you, readers who came here looking for pictures of “monkey fucking,” “monkey wedding,” and “monkey blowjob.”