Vier – Book 4 of the Glyph series

Over twenty years have passed in the events of the Glyph series. Audee has attacked a Glyph and assumed to be dead but before that, she joined forces with Ferkiz Joota and started something in motion. Mechal wants nothing to do with it but his son and daughter are sucked up into the conspiracy. The two siblings must now find their way through the puzzle left for them to solve. If they don’t, the Vier will destroy them all.

You can find Vier along with the other Glyph series books on amazon or on itch.io

The whole Glyph series is available in one hardcover book here.

Starting Something Different

I’ve started a project that’s different than anything else I’ve done. One of my most frequently downloaded games is The Lost, a little solo RPG that took a month or so to write. It appears the market for games you can play by yourself is much larger than any group game.

I’ve always wanted to make a video game. I’ve had several concepts I’ve dreamt about over the years and I’ve made some attempts to learn how to code for video games in the past but I’ve never really been able to connect all the dots before.

Now there are a number of engines available that make connecting the dots easier and I’ve made more progress than ever before.

There’s a lot to learn to get a game to work but I have some basic structures built and working. It’s not a game yet, It’s just a map and a character that can move around but that’s further than I’ve ever gotten before.

I’m not going to kid myself, this is a big project for me, but it feels like as I push through problems I’m running into, I’m making progress. I’m actually fine with writing code. I’ve built really complex websites before that manipulated data extensively. Once I figure out how to make a game engine do something reliably, I can go to town on building the code to make a cool game.

One of the things that a game needs a huge amount of is artwork. It’s kind of funny that there are a million YouTube channels that are there to teach you how to make a game, but they try to skip over that part. It would be more helpful to fess up that art is vital than to try and hide it. It makes it really hard to figure out how to make progress at first.

I’m wondering if I shouldn’t do some kind of development log. A lot of people do YouTube videos for a log but I feel like what I’m doing is not photogenic yet and trying to make videos would add one more skill that I’d have to learn. Maybe the next game will be the time to try that.

What is this game? It’s a narrative driven, rouge like, tower defense game. It will follow the story of a kind of prepper main character that is trying to survive incursions of robot scouting parties. The goal is to keep hidden, mostly by stopping the scout parties.

Instead of the typical tower staples, there’s tripwire shotguns, pit traps and electric fences. It might get to a more traditional tower defense game as you progress through it but I don’t want it to lose a more down to earth feel. If it gets a bit more fantastic, at least you’ll know how you got there.

Another goal is for there to be a strong story to the game. Usually tower defense games are pretty lean on story. “They’re attacking and you have to blow them up” is usually how it goes. The concept here, is to have an overall story arc and involve human stories. So this prepper occasionally is approached by people that are looking for shelter. They are resources as far as what they might bring with them, but they’re also liabilities in that, they may not be reliable. I can see a lot going wrong with that and it’s exactly what I’m going for.

When will this be done? I don’t know yet. It could be years. I’ll just have to keep pushing and find out.

Working On Station Keepers

Hey, I can finally say I’ve run a successful Kickstarter! Station Keepers is a go and I’m furiously working on it. The first phase of getting a functional structure is in place and now I’m working on infusing it with some more meaning. Not that I’m trying to shoehorn meaning into it, but each design speaks in it’s own voice. Station Keepers has a specific voice and I’m trying to find it. Maybe I have my metaphor, but I’ll have to see if I can make it work.

A busy weekend

Jump Temp went live on DriveThru RPG on Friday Woo!

My son and I attended Queen City Conquest and I got to run a game of The Artifact and Jump Temp. We had fun and I got to run through some pre planned scenarios. I almost never plan out a game, but I figured I should come with something in mind for a convention game. I have never run a convention game before and I was super nervous until I actually started GMing at which point it all felt very normal.

Still, I’m a bit exhausted by all the excitement. Exhausted but happy about it.

On a new webhost

I haven’t had a chance to write because I’ve been migrating to a new web host. I’ve had to pear down the what I have available here. The discussion forums are gone (but backed up) and I’m dropping the Steampunkfitters website. The game will just be a page on Store32 now.

Artwork

I’m feeling good, I have my new art tablet, a Monoprice 14481 and I’m really enjoying it. Setting it up wasn’t easy because there’s very little documentation to go on, but I eventually found enough little snippets of information on message boards to get it working properly.

I’ve done some pictures for Eat the Meappets as  a warm up and I’m working on pictures for Protector right now. I’m thinking that I want to go in a different direction with the art in Jump Temp. I’d like to try a different style that I’m not really sure I know how to pull off. It’ll be interesting to try though.

I’ve already finished around ten pieces and I’ve been trying to get in one every two days. Jump Temp and Protector are both around 80 pages, so they both need around 20 pictures minimum.

After that, I’ll start working on the last sourcebook for The Artifact. This is going to be a busy year.

On the non-artwork front, I’ve halfway put together my beginner friendly RPG that doesn’t use character sheets and tracks things on a board (or one sheet of paper). I have something of a story to build to, but I’m looking for that little something, a twist or other element that makes the setting come alive.

Game Making To Do List

I’ve got way to many pans in the fire. I need to select a target and finish it off one by one so that I can clean up my backlog of projects. The following list is more for me than for anyone else to read through. I just thought it’d be fun to share.

  1. Artwork for Protector.
  2. Artwork for Jump Temp.
  3. Edit and finish Eat the Meappets and then make artwork for it.
  4. Re-write the last sourcebook for The Artifact-Imbalance of Power and update it’s art.
  5. Write another chapter for The Imbalance (An Artifact based novel)
  6. Finish my goofy shark tank like game Apparatus Dominant
  7. Make an expansion pack for I Didn’t Do It! murder mystery card game
  8. Work on my sci-fi random story generator, a project I dropped a while ago but looking back, made some real progress on.
  9. A revamp and clarified version of Bubs the Robot.

Honestly that list is shorter than I expected it to be. A lot of it is waiting on artwork that I just haven’t felt like doing, but not all of it. There’s a bit there I can get moving on without art.

Although I do have a bunch of non-Store32 things I’m trying to do, I’m taking programming courses, I have two books I want to read, etc. The point of this is to try and tick off a few of these items so that I don’t feel like I’m so far behind in all my projects.

I’m hoping to buy a new digitizer tablet for art soon. I’ve recently discovered that there’s a lot of options that are far less expensive than I thought. I’m hoping that the art malaise I’ve been feeling is due to my underperforming Fujitsu tablet making art less than enjoyable to produce. I guess I’ll throw $400 at the problem and hope it goes away.

Mad Scientist Invention Game

I still don’t have a name for it, but we playtested a new card game the other day and had a lot of fun. The players get five cards that say what their invention does. Some cards are good, some are bad.

The players show off the good things their invention does and hide the bad. They do a little elevator pitch for their invention and try and describe it. The fun part is the descriptions are really goofy when they’re all mashed together. We were giggling through the whole playtest.

Next the players pick if they want to be an early adopter and invest heavily in someone else’s invention, make a small investment in an invention, or not invest at all. Early adopters get to see all the bad cards, investors only get to see one bad card of the inventor’s choosing (naturally the least bad card).

Now everyone votes what invention they would actually buy. There are monetary rewards for having your invention picked and rewards for investing wisely, but bad cards cut down on the rewards. The player with the most money at the end of the game is the winner.

Except. . .

There is an “Ends Civilization” card. If an inventor can get an invention with this card in it’s stack to be purchased by the other players, they automatically win the game!

Drive

I was leaping down the rabbit hole that the internet is, and found a comic called Drive that has some very similar ideas to the game I’m working on Jump Temp.

The comic story and the game story are actually very different, but there are key elements that show a similarity. The drive tech is discovered by accident and while it can be modified and recreated, no one knows why they work. The other is a class of characters that are very short lived, are big and strong. And there are no shields.

Okay so other than that, the two stories are very different. I just thought it was a little weird. And you should check out Drive if you haven’t already because it’s funny and well done.