Earlier in the week I got an unsolicited job offer from a great game company and today, a famous game designer contacted me about an unpublished game of mine. Feeling pretty good about life right now. I must be doing something right.
Category Archives: achievement unlocked
my appearance on the meeple syrup show
This week I appeared on the Meeple Syrup Show, a video series about games and game design, hosted by game designers from Canada. We talked about war games!
Sen, Dylan and Daryl were delightful hosts, but I have a suggestion for future shows: please provide a list of topics and possible questions to your guests. You guys prepared some great questions in advance, any of them worthy of extended discussion, but I stumbled a couple of times groping for answers. I’d love to engage on a deeper level, but I’d like some time to prepare, too!
Here’s the show for your viewing pleasure:
with apologies to Austin Kleon and John Kovalic
Creative guy Austin Kleon touched a nerve with a smart, subversive post that reminds us we could be doing something we love instead of wasting time on our mobile devices.
Reading books makes me happy. Being on my phone makes me miserable. So, I made a wallpaper for my iPhone’s lock screen to remind me that I have a choice.
My pal John Kovalic picked up the idea and ran with it on DorkTower, with a decidedly more proactive, writerly bent.
I liked John’s encouraging, productive take on it and decided to make a wallpaper suitable for a game designer’s iPad. I’m not a graphic designer, but I like how it turned out.
If you use it, send me a screenshot or selfie and I’ll post it here.
With thanks (and apologies) to Austin Kleon and John Kovalic.
mercy, mercy, mercy!
Summer is always such a busy time for me with my garden and so many other outdoor activities and fun events around Madison, that I hardly have time for game design. Still, I’ll need to carve out a few hours to finish up a prototype before I leave for Protospiel next week.
I’m taking the latest iteration of LXIX: Year of Four Emperors with me to test some changes I made at the Roundhouse Retreat in June. It’s in really good shape right now. I’m pretty happy with it.
I’m staying with my buddy James this year during Protospiel, instead of at the hotel. He and I are collaborating on a game. We’re still in the very early stages, passing our design document back and forth on Google Docs, but we’re planning to spend Friday hammering something out to test on Saturday at the con.
I bought a new (to me) vehicle a couple weeks ago and I love it. It has a CD player–the first I’ve had in quite a few years–so I dug out some of my old disks last night. Here’s one of my favorites. Maybe it’ll get us into the design groove.
“Games” by The Cannonball Adderley Quintet, from Mercy, Mercy, Mercy! Live at ‘The Club’
“We do not stop playing because we grow old, we grow old because we stop playing!”
– Benjamin Franklin
play without fear 