That book…
It wasn’t entirely surprising that even during the month of the Kickstarter, the price of printing was, like almost everything else, steadily rising with the cost of paper pulp, ink, energy and shipping all chiming in. I already had various quotes from earlier in the year and the plan was to use the people that made the ten prototype books to do the main run, but their final price was pretty shocking to say the least. Chris Wilkins, of Retro Fusion Books, kindly gave me the contact details for his UK printing agent and this opened my options up considerably and we spent November exploring different possibilities.
As I mentioned in my Kickstarter update, during this time a lot more work was done of the general art layout of the book, which is crazy full of photos. Eventually, by early December, final print-candidate documents were passing back and forth between myself and the printer, who would find some issue and send it back to me to fix. I now know more about bleed margins and slug areas than I ever thought possible. Anyway, the book is now in a long print queue waiting for production. Nothing more happens until the first copy is printed and sent to me for final approval. Kinda scary!
Trieste
Back in the middle of last year I was invited to talk at the IVIPRO Trieste Science+Fiction Festival in Italy in early November. This event is mostly movie based, but has a fast growing gaming side-shoot. Now, the idea of me standing up and giving a talk is just preposterous — it’ll never happen! But, oddly, I like being interviewed (if the questions are good) and so I countered that I would do that if it was an option — they agreed to this idea which meant that I couldn’t wriggle out of it.
It turned out that the organiser, Andrea Dresseno, was a fan of Broken Sword and so my first task was to sign a dozen different items of Revolution merch. Everyone else was like — who is this guy? The interview itself was okay — I believe, I’ll never watch it — and you can probably find it out there somewhere if you’re so inclined.
I think the interview format is underrated and out of favour at the moment, but, if done properly, can be very revealing if the interviewer can respond to answers in real time and steer the conversation to make new discoveries. In theory, as the person being interviewed, I might also learn something from some new and intriguing question. In the case of Revolution and its history, there are a lot of potential ‘what if’ scenarios that are good to explore. For example — what would have happened if Good Cop Bad Cop had been completed and was successful?
The centre-piece of the festival was the big opening night in a local cinema. This involved walking up some red carpet (yay!) accompanied by Storm Troopers (also, yay!) and listening to some movie people talking about the event. After this, everyone stayed to watch the feature movie. Everyone but the games people who all stood up and left — we had other things to do, like eating and drinking!
Anyway, I survived having to be social and well-behaved for two days, before flying back to the UK. In about six months time I’ll be recovered enough to do something like it once again, perhaps. I certainly liked walking down red carpet.
Wormhole Dungeon
While I wait for the book to get printed, I’ve doubled down on the development of my game project, which now has a title — Wormhole Dungeon. And it is so-called because it’s a tech dungeon in space and wormhole’s are kinda cool sounding.
I’ve been trying to write a variation of this game for years now, and each time something has gone awry and the project has ground to a halt. Usually some design flaw or the platform itself has tripped me up. Despite claims to the contrary, I find that Unity sucks the life out of projects and those working on them. A kind of game dev energy vampire.
I’m now coding in the LUA programming language (so, so lovely) using a platform called LÖVE 2D, which gives the developer just enough and doesn’t impose any structure or methodology. I haven’t worked so quickly, or effectively, since the early days of Revolution. I’ve also found a terrific pixel artist to make it all look good.
The game itself is a variation on the 2D Metroidvania theme (what we called Arcade-Adventure back in the 8 bit days). I’m not one to follow the rules on what genre purists might consider to be this, or that, and so the game will just be whatever it turns out to be. There’ll be shooting, but it won’t be hard to play, and everything I have learnt during 25 years of making adventure games will be used to the full, meaning — narrative, characterisation, puzzles, humour, and the rest. In some ways it’ll be a spiritual sequel to my first game, Obsidian, but with deep rich Beneath a Steel Sky flavours on the palette, too. My main aim is authenticity and a few thousand happy players. I think I can do that, but let’s see how it goes!
Of course I want to avoid meddling middle-men as much as possible and to do this requires interfacing with potential players and building a following long before any actual release. With this in mind I’ll start showing bits of the game pretty much from now onwards. I have this idea that I could perhaps, at some point later this year, pre-sell some limited run first-edition boxed copies of the game in order to further fund it. I like real stuff and I think other people do, too. It’s good to actually own something tangible as opposed to something that only exists on some server that one day, you just know, will stop being available for some ‘cost effective’ based reason…
Thanks for reading and I’ll be back shortly with a report on copy #1 of the book :)