Mobius wimmelbilder – behind the scenes
Before I share the exciting project we spent 8 months working with an amazing wimmelbilder artist to complete, if you missed either my overview of what "wimmelbilder" means, or my introduction to the amazing Nigel Sussman, take a minute to catch up....
Wimmelbilder – Greatest German word ever?
Language is funny stuff. Often absurd. Especially English. I certainly make that point often enough in my writing by having my characters misinterpret even the most common of sentiments in amusing ways. As a professional language-wrangler, I probably torture it more...
Yachts Are Evolving – Into Starships?
Early space travel was never going to be cheap… When I came up with the story of Hotel Caledonia (mission 7 of Black Ocean: Mercy for Hire), the idea of subsea cruising was supposed to be part of the futuristic novelty. The Venetian Dream was a submarine kitted out...
The Puzzled Patron
I'm doing a little bit of a different take on the "fantasy board game" theme this week. This is a puzzle, but one whose artwork speaks directly to the D&D parts of my fantasy gamer soul. The Magic Puzzle Company (side note: always reminds me of the company names...
The Witcher – One of the few times you don’t need to read the book first
Back in 1990, Polish author published a short story collection whose title, in English, was The Witcher. In 2008, someone translated the first of a series of novels in that universe into English. In 2007, CD Projekt produced a video game version. And in 2019, the...
What Has Nine Lives and Is Stuck in a Loop?
A premise does not a story make. This one comes up time and again in Author Scrapheap. A lot of times I come up with a story idea that’s really just a tiny premise with possibly a thin plot notion attached, almost like an apology note stuck under someone’s windshield...
Incoming Transmission: Space Stations Are Hard Enough to Fix…
If only the antenna wasn’t the first thing broken. Incoming Transmission is a co-op puzzle game wherein a team tries to complete a set of repairs to a space station. One player is given the details of a mission to accomplish, then broadcasts that to the repair crew on...
Genetically engineered plants
Your Garden Center Doesn’t Carry THESE (yet…) Maybe you wanted to add a pop of color to a living space or just enjoy tending to living things and watching them grow. But people have been keeping indoor plants for a variety of reasons since ancient times. One of the...
12 Monkeys: Time Travel Cranked to 11
The Army of the 12 Monkey was just the start Terry Gilliam’s 1995 movie, 12 Monkeys, starring Bruce Willis and Brad Pitt, was a looping time travel romp of causality and predestiny, ultimately ending in tragedy (sorry if that’s a spoiler of a nearly 30-year-old...
Endless Blanket Fort
Who doesn't love a blanket fort? …maybe when it's like Labyrinth meets Coraline. So, I’ve always loved the notion of the "X wishes" story. You’ve got the "learned a lesson" endings, the "didn’t need wishes after all" endings, the "you’re horrible and your wishes are...