Encodya: Just a girl and her robot
Point-and-click puzzle games are a mainstay of PC gaming dating back to the 80s. Due to the limited scope, they can be reliably produced by indie game companies, leading to something of a resurgence in the genre. One of the more recent offerings in this vein, made...
Google Maps Timeline: The Argument-Killing Machine
"We haven’t been to X in ages." "What was the name of that little Italian place we stopped at the day we went to Y?" "Yes, we went to Z on our anniversary. I remember buying the tickets!" Little conjectures, quibbles, and memory lapses like these are the grout between...
Altered Carbon: What Happens When Tech Makes Life Cheap?
Altered Carbon begins with a futuristic twist on the noir whodunnit. The victim commissions the detective’s help himself. Thanks to an alien technology that is poorly understood (yet nonetheless replicated and mass-produced), human consciousness can be stored...
Chess: Good Game, Bad Plot
Chess is having something of a minor resurgence these days (all things being relative, it’s probably still less popular than the average pay-to-win mobile game). I’ve been playing at a half-assed level since I was a kid, so my books have often used chess as a metaphor...
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...