Today I woke up early, showered and played a bit of Broken Sword on the iPhone. It’s a really well put together adventure game.

Then I went over to Nick and Amanda’s where I and their friend Ryan were meeting to go out hiking. We stopped and grabbed yummy kolaches first and then went to the park. I can’t remember the name of the park, but it was a great hiking trail.

Then we went to see Cop Out at the Alamo. Pretty silly movie. It could have been directed by anyone. As Kevin Smith didn’t write it, it didn’t seem to have anyone signature on the film.

After the film we went back to their place and watched Amanda play Heavy Rain for a few hours. Totally different game than what I experienced in the demo. I’m really looking forward to playing the game on my own. I can see what changes by making different decisions than Amanda.

I had to leave and go to Great Hall as I was playing in a Dominion Tournament. This was a slick operation. Everyone got personalized name badges to wear. We played three rounds, with three different load outs. They had these funky tournament rules where you played until 45 minutes were up or you ran out of *all* Victory cards. At first this sounded crazy, but it totally worked. You totaled your scores from each game and that was your tournament score. I ended up in 3rd place with 121 points. 1st was 125 and 2nd was 123, so it was close. Plus, the guy who got first place was taught by a guy that I had originally taught to play the game. Overall, it was a blast to play. It was like being in a geek poker tournament. Everyone was standing around, talking strategy, how each game had gone. Super fun.

I was restless last night, so I made this, inspired by a friend’s Facebook post.

It has been a while since I wrote something with a proper ending. The Stork doesn’t count. I mean like a story or poem, something like that. I have plenty of beginnings and middles lately, what with all these various writing projects. What if I get out of practice and find myself unable to end something at the right time?

I better do a remedial ending, just to keep the juices flowing.

Ahem…

Eric turned the last of the dials and felt the heavy tumblers thud into place somewhere in the machinery below. Unsealing the phial, he let the nanophage drip over the dials, melting them into something else, something that would never open again. Back against the metal wall, he let out a sigh, deflating, sliding to the cold floor. His sigh whisped away into the darkness of the vault to visit with the other ghosts.

The sodium lights failed for a moment and then swelled back to life. Eric didn’t notice. He had the locket open in his hand. One last look before snapping it shut. All worth it in the end.

Photoshop turned 20 this year. I first started using version 1 in college, back when it was Mac only, offered only greyscale, and had no layers. It was really meant to act as a digital darkroom for post processing scanned photos. You could sort of draw stuff with it, but that’s what Illustrator was for. Suggesting that one might one day use Photoshop to design web sites or illustrate comics would have been like suggesting that one day Notepad would be used to help land airplanes.

I use Photoshop practically every day. My work depends on it.

Here’s to you, Photoshop. Who knows where I would be without you.

It snowed today. Big, thick flakes that stuck. The kids in the apartment complex across the street had a snowball fight instead of shooting at each other.

Today, as I methodically vacuumed the rugs, I remembered something that happened a few weeks ago. The maintenance people were systematically going from apartment to apartment, changing air filters and checking the smoke detectors. A stern little woman herded the maintenance men around, delegating which apartment each should go to.

Eventually they came to my apartment. Once the little woman had a chance to appraise my place she said, “This isn’t your apartment, is it? Is this your girlfriend’s?” When I insisted that I lived there and asked her to explain, she just snickered. I would love to meet someone who had three video game consoles and a Millennium Falcon in her living room.

Just before she left, she looked at my rugs and exclaimed, “Where did you get these?”

I told her I bought them years ago at Wal-Mart.

She said, “No. I looked at Wal-Mart for rugs like this and they didn’t have them.”

Then she walked out.

Having recently played the Heavy Rain demo, Batman: Arkham Asylum, and Uncharted 2, I’ve been thinking about linearity in video games and the impact on game play and narrative. As I have already written a piece on the subject, this is more of an addendum.

I have come up with a Theory of Player Freedom vs. Narrative Cohesion (working title): The scope of a player’s freedom to explore a game world and choose courses of action is inversely proportional to the cohesiveness of any overarching narrative structure. Read the rest of this entry »

Recently I decided to try reading the the Dune books in chronological order, including the extended universe books by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson. I made it about 100 or so pages into the Butlerian Jihad before I couldn’t stand it. The story seemed epic and could have been interesting, but the writing was just so juvenile I couldn’t justify spending more time in the series.

So I satisfied my Dune craving by rewatching the Dune Extended Edition with Nick and Amanda. Despite the horribly dated effects, it is still awesome.

Once I had put together The Stork, I needed a place to get it printed. For the trial run, I used Kinko’s/FedEx Office. Fantastic results in less than a day, but very expensive. I wanted to be able to print it cheaply enough to sell for $1-$2 or just give away.

I had seen some of the work Guild of Blades had done for card games and they recently started doing Print on Demand books. Their prices were insanely low. So I called them up, discussed the job, and sent them the PDFs. I didn’t hear anything back. I called about a week later to follow up. They were really busy and hadn’t had a chance to review the files. This went on for two months. Finally, in January, they had time to look at my files. Read the rest of this entry »