http://www.indiestrategygames.com/

This is three games plus expansions. The first, Gratuitous Space Battles (GSB) is this cute little game where you make your ships, set it up, and watch them blow each other up. Now, that might not excite a lot of people, but I love the creator bits of 4X games and this doesn’t require hundreds of hours of time to get working. Just set up the battles and go. And, it kind of makes me feel like Ender. There is also Solium Infernum and AI War in there. I haven’t gotten to them, but they look like a lot of fun. Basically, I bought the back to find something new and to buy GSB.

The entire pack is $50 but I think I’m going to get my money’s worth on it (under $1/hour). I believe the special ends Monday.

http://www.direct2drive.com/2/9236/product/Buy-Best-of-Indie-Bundle-Vol.-3-Download

This is a bigger game pack for only $30. It has all the winners and finalists of the Independent Game Festival.

• World of Goo: I already own this game and absolutely love it. The goos make such adorable sounds. Hrm, reminds me, I need to ask about the profanity pack I ordered.
• Puzzlegeddon
• Gish
• The Maw
• Braid: Played this for an answer. It has some really neat puzzles, a bit on the hard part for me, but the “rewind time” is great for undoing mistakes.
• Cogs
• Aaaaa!
• Osmos
• Machinarium: This is a click puzzle adventure but it looks absolutely gorgeous.
• Crayon Physics Deluxe: I already reviewed this game, it is still great.

I like supporting indie game writers. Much like I support people who show up at GenCon to sell their books. Yes, most of them are POD or not through the classical distribution channels, but it doesn’t mean they poured less of their heart into it. Yeah, they might not be as fancy or smooth as the $60 game, but I think they can be just as much fun. Plus, for me, it is the fact I’m supporting someone who writes in their spare time, after doing their full-time jobs in hope that they’ll make it big. Because… I hope to be that person in my own time.

And that is why I’m sitting on a hotel bed in Illinois instead of obsessing about my novel in Iowa.

Just little detail things left in the house. Cleaning up some of the paint travesties, sanding down the bathtub, and removing the last few bags of garbage from the place. It is the tiny little things that I hope will add up to someone wanting to buy it and someone deciding it looks like a piece of shit.

It is also very stressful.

This place isn’t home anymore. It is a house. A lovely house I wish I could still live in, but it isn’t my house anymore. It puts the place I’m renting in a bad light, because it feels such much like a step down.

I got this little inverter for the car and spent the entire drive down here working on my writing tool chain applications. And a bit this morning and Friday night. I got to a pretty reasonable part, it can do everything I need it to do for the next critique, so I’m setting it aside and focusing on writing for the next week.

I’m trying to integrate the critique’s group suggestions into my writing (accidentally made an ass of myself last time *sigh*). Not all of them, but a good number are valid issues and I think I need to work with. But, I feel like I’m just smearing words on paper, desperately hoping to get something that shines out of them.

I also realized, I will probably never know if I hit that spark. So, best to just do the best I can and push it out there, someone else will tell me if I hit it.

I did also post my commission online (and got paid yesterday for the honor). Got about 50 responses across three forums in 72 hours, which is just awesome because it makes me feel so happy. It also fired up two philosophical discussions.

It is interesting that I have a following, Or at least people who thank me for prior stories and and basically feel the need to ask me for more or compare me to others in that writing field. Some days, I wonder how I actually got the fans I do have. I’m not a great writer. None of my stuff ever showed up on Amazon or on the NY Times list. All I did was post but somehow, people remember me there and ask for more.

But, still a nice warm feeling to see those compliments on the screen.

We were in Half-Price Books, one of our favorite places, while Bouncy ran from shelf to shelf with child-like glee. I naturally had to mention that Anton Strout and Mark Henry had two–no doubt brilliant–books coming out this week (buy plug) but we would have to go to a non-used bookstore to get them.

But, we got to talking about RPG’s. And, more importantly, designing or taking existing systems and make them work for our styles of play.

We both run (ran in my case) Exalted and various White Wolf Systems. He runs RIFTS and I ran D20/D&D for a lot of years. Uteck also helped me for three years play-testing my own RPG, Balance. Right now, Uteck is trying to set up an Exalted game, but he is tweaking the system to make it fit with his own needs. Mostly through house rules. We are part of that entire hacking community, of sorts, when it comes to RPG’s.

But, it lead into an interesting opinion that we both share. White Wolf has a fantastic system. It is simple, easy to get players into it, but it isn’t consistent. The basic mechanics for Exalted are just *slightly* different than New World of Darkness which are slightly different than Scion. I feel that they would do well to use a single core mechanic (NWoD’s main book) and simply write systems around it. For example, I think Scion would have a lot more punch if they built the scions on top of a normal mortal and use the rules from that book as vampires, werewolves, and everything else. I had the same hopes for Exalted 2, that they would have basic mortals and you add the Exalted templates on top of them. That way, you are encouraged to make the mortal before they exalt.

That never really occurred to Uteck. He struggled with tweaking rules, adjusting health levels, to fit the same framework as Exalted 2. When I mentioned that NWoD + Scion is a pretty kick-ass system (I had a few attempts at it, liked the results but never polished them) he was interested. But, he just spent two months trying to balance rules before starting his new game.

Of course, Uteck also created some of the indexes on the White Wolf site, showing the huge variety of references across all the Exalted books for just one region. It was an impressive job, but it also highlighted some of those inconsistencies. That lead into his attempts to “fix” it (fix being working for him). But, in some ways, those house rules end up being patches on top of a system already there. I did the same thing with Scroll of the Lands, since I felt the original Mandate of Heaven stepped away from the mechanics already presented and had a much different “feel”. I like to think I’m a mechanics manager in general. Sadly, I lost the ability to really work on Scroll simply because I stopped playing (no Exalted group in Iowa I would consider). If I kept playing, I would have finished but I found myself going from practical gaming experience to theoretical knowledge, which doesn’t make a good game for anyone.

Even with all that, I still buy Exalted books and White Wolf. Why? Because I like their world-building and I like seeing the progression of their skills in creating massively shared worlds. Even if I create an alternative reality where the Empress became the betrothed to the Earth Dragon who is mostly decidedly undead, I still have it based on White Wolf’s original creation.

I had the same problem with Balance, but I was working from scratch. Actually, it was going very well until I listened to the wrong people. I tried to dumb it down and lost a lot of the critical focus of the game. I still keep my notes, mainly because I think object-oriented gaming will some day be a reality, but also because I was really proud of what I created.

Game design, be it extending or adapting a pre-existing system or creating your own, is a very happy mixture of world-building, and basically programming. It is complicated systems wrapped around the fluffy creative center. And, I think there is a lot of common with the open source movement. You have a system (program) and you add on it. Sometimes it sticks, sometimes it doesn’t. But, it is fun to play with the system is to actually play in the system.

Bouncy and Uteck showed up for the weekend, mainly to chat and socialize. I got to talk about gaming (another post) and I actually brought up the entire “dad”, “papa”, or “Dylan” thing. And, as many things happened, one thing to lead to another and I mentioned the names of the characters in my novel.

They didn’t have a problem with Kanéko or Dyfan, but I said Sonjif, I got an immediate response from both of them:

Oh god, that’s a terrible name.

Well… that is a little blow to the ego. I struggled with the name, but I’m using a foundation for the names in the world. Mostly rafsi from Lojban since it is slightly different than English, the names mostly mean something, and I have a pattern. Of course, that means most names are in chains of CVV, CVC, or CCV (C is constant, V is vowel). Though, I did forget that all of them also have a 4-letter rafsi which adds CVCC and CCVC. And, all names have to end in constants, which can be additional letter (-C). So, using those rules, I can have a CVVC name or one that is simply CCV. It also means, since I’m using that language structure, that most nicknames or “use names” will be 3-4 characters long (i.e. Sonjif’s shortened form of Kanéko which ends up being Kan).

I got much of the same feedback from the critique group, which means that “Sonjif” is a bad name. In general, both Dyfan and Kanéko are both real-world names (though I’m using Japanese influences for my desert folk and those names have accents to indicate gender). But, I need to change Sonjif. So, going to figure out a good name, but it was originally based on Sonia (which is an illegal name in this case).

After some really good discussions with the critique group, I do need to also change Dyfan, mainly because I have some other “d” name characters they interact heavily with and reading outloud gets confusing. I’ll probably just change it to something close to it, like “Tyfan” which is still pronouncable and breaks up the similiar name problem.

In a different part of writing, I got a short story out on Friday. The reading period ended that day, so I’m hoping that they meant 23:59:59 instead of “end of the work day”. Oh well, nothing ventured, nothing gained. It’s an okay story, not what I would call great at this point, but it could be the shadow of the critique speaking.

It is amazing how fragile I can get from opinions of my writing. I think it makes sense, since we (writers) seem to put so much of ourselves into our writing. It will be a good story when I finish, just need to get there.

One of the technical side is I decided to learn Git at the same time I polish up my writing toolchains (series of programs that work together). So, I created a git repository for mfgames-writing toolchain which will have the various programs I use to write. Right now, I only have the beginning of mfgames-docbook for converting from DocBook 5 XML files to PDF. Eventually, it will include HTML, ePUB, BBCode, ODF, and text. I’m going to also add a few other programs, like the Creole version.

Update: Fixed link, renamed things.

For the rest of the week, I’m focusing on other smaller writing projects. Last week, I finished polishing up the editing for my commission. The commissioner loved it and only asked me to change someone’s hairstyle because it resembled a friend and the character in question ended up very dead. I can’t argue with that, I really can’t.

This week, I’m working on a short, seven thousand word, transgendered cyberpunk. It is due Thursday, which means I need to get off my literary ass and get chugging. It isn’t a sure thing, but I’m really enjoying the romance part of it and it forces me to write shorter, more concise stories. My normal average is ten thousand words, so cutting a few grand helps me improve myself.

I decided that it could make a reasonable mp3 player, which is does, and I could offload some of the music playing at work to something a bit more portable. Kind of like my 1 GB Sansa but more… capable. Jim Hines got me thinking about single purpose devices, i.e. the Kindle, and multi-purpose, i.e. my n810. Though, when I tried to get a memory expansion card, I hit some bumps. Apparently, the miniSD is a dead technology and I accidentally ended up picking the larger SD card instead of the much more expensive microSD that I could have found an adapter to. So, I have a 8 GB SD card and nowhere to jam it.

Later I found a kit to make the n810 work with SD cards. Just a little hacking, but it also fits with an expanded battery I’ve been eying. It adds to the price (and hours to enjoy it), but after five days, I was still thinking about it, so I bought the kit and battery.

I’ll find out later if it was a terrible thing.

I’m also enjoying it as an eBook reader. The various discussions got me going and I threw a couple public domain books on it. And my own, of course. Then, today, while waiting in the doctor’s office, I pulled it out and enjoyed the Wizard of Oz, complete with silver shoes and china people. Finished it actually, forgot how good that book was.

I also tried Mer, what will be the successor to Diablo for my n810. It is because Nokia is no longer producing software for the n810, now that they have the pretty n900 running around. I have a small amount of jealousy because the n900 has 3D graphics, but I’m hoping Mer will get it.

Mer itself is pretty slick… but doesn’t do much. I already know it warned that it was a beta version. And that it could format your drive. And terrible things would happen if you install it, but I did it anyways. From what I saw, it will be exactly what I want, but probably in a year or so. Not quite ready for Dylan. But, I have to give serious kudos to the Mer folks though.

I’m not really a gizmo person. This is the first real gadget I’ve gotten in years since my original Apple Newton and second generation Palm Pilot. I’m enjoying playing around with it and seeing how it could be useful, but I’m also noticing that I’m customizing it to fit me instead of wrapping my mind around what it provides. Probably the chewy Linux goodness inside, but I feel comfortable adapting it to me.

Plus, I’m getting a lot of use out of it right now, so I’m going to keep on doing that.

I also worked on getting MG ready for eBooks. Yes, it is at the end of its effective life of being a niche novel with a small reader base, but print on demand (POD) gives me the chance to keep it out there, long after it is no longer commercially viable. Plus, I get the chance of learning how to do typesetting and enjoying all those little technical details about creating books I don’t exactly get as a writer.

I hate when books disappear. I’ve been trying to get copies of some of my favorite novels for years but for some reason don’t want to spend $80 for a banged up copy. I’d rather give the original author a few more dollars for the work they put into it. Traditional publishing might not allow that, except for the evergreens and classics. So, I went with POD for MG (and now eBooks). Someone might want it in a few years, so might as well keep it out there. Creating an eBook is something I’m willing to do, because it doesn’t take that much effort once you have the original manuscript.

Me keeping MG alive is much like my reviews. I write the reviews that I want to get. I keep MG up because I would love it if other publishing companies would do the same. No, it won’t make them do it, but if I’m not willing to do it myself, how could I ask anyone else to? I already know I’d pay for a POD book that I remember from my past, or one that simply doesn’t show up on the shelf anymore. Same with eBooks. Doesn’t mean you have to advertise them to avoid diluting the new novels, but I’d still like it to be out there.

But, time to work on the new again. I owe Noble Pen chapter three by tonight, so between doing cleaning, accounting, taxes, and ripping DVD’s, I need to clean up chapters one through three and get it posted.

The rest of this is about the technical side of my writing.

It did also point out some flaws in the tool chain I’m building up for writing. Most of my commissions end up using Gentium for the “final” release. I already know that most people don’t like Courier New as a font so I have my public font. I usually send out my commissions as PDF’s so I like to use that font. (Side note, my first novel is typeset in Gentium also.) So, I had to modify my docbook2pdf to let me change styles on the fly. While I was at it, I also added the ability to remove table of contents; I use section breaks pretty heavily and I couldn’t find a good way of doing it in DocBook, so I basically use a title-less section tag for it. It works out pretty well, except for the cruft in the TOC. So, one little flag, “–notoc” and magic doesn’t happen.

I’m also working on getting MG ready to be an ePub file for Lulu. I’m using the same system as Flight of the Scions and the same tools. Though, MG has chapter illustrations in it so I wanted to put them in. It took me a little bit to get my creole2docbook program to parse it as a proper DocBook image, but once I got it, the converter to ePub (creatively enough, docbook2epub) sticks them in.

I got another little rush to see the illustrations on my Nokia n810 reading my own little eBook. Strangely, it took me more effort to get my name in the ePub format. Apparently, while the following seems to work-

<author>Dylan R. E. Moonfire</author>

-what I should have done was this:

<author>
  <surname>Moonfire</surname>
  <firstname>Dylan R. E.</firstname>
</author>

The first works for HTML and PDF’s, but the bottom works for everything. Just a note for those trying to get names using the docbook-xsl-ns stylesheets and DocBook 5.

I also figured out how to get tags into the books. These are basically categories. I haven’t found the One True Taxonomy™ for these, so I threw in a random one that sounded right and I’ll add others as I get better at this. The taxonomy goes into the <info> section:

<subjectset>
  <subject>
    <subjectterm>Fantasy</subjectterm>
    <subjectterm>Steampunk</subjectterm>
    <subjectterm>Coming of Age</subjectterm>
  </subject>
</subjectset>

I’m also not using the standard docbook2* programs I found on Linux. Most of them are geared toward DocBook 4 or less. A bunch of them use LaTeX, which I like, but I like the XSL:FO approach to creating PDF’s much better. Plus, DocBook 5 is a really nice implementation of XML instead of SGML. I like it better, but I needed to create my own tools to do what I wanted. And that is almost as fun as the writing process itself.

I’m really enjoying writing this. It still has that “new writing project” smell. I’ve been distracted with my commission and got the first draft finished last night. Tomorrow, I’ll do the second, then Saturday/Sunday the third. I’ll send it out on Sunday.

If things go well, I’ll probably be writing a chapter or two for Flight of the Scions for Sunday again. If there are others that want to have something, I won’t submit anything, but I’m just having fun. I decided that I’ll only submit something if there is an empty slot.

In other writing news, I started getting my first novel formatted for an ePub. Remarkably, I had most of the tools already, my odt2text program dumped it into a format just slightly wrong. It doesn’t have the illustrations in, but I need to create reduced DPI versions for the reader anyways (72 verses 600 dpi for print). I’m also going to put the amazing cover I got for it. It will be easier than typesetting the book, but I think there is still a bit of effort to make the ePub file look “good”.

I still loving making my self-published books look good, be it in print or on screen. Just a matter of pride, but I find doing it from end-to-end to be just as exciting as doing just one part.

Sooner or later, we’ll have flexible pricing on eBooks How do I know? The movie industry. Walmart sells DVD’s for $5 cheaper during opening week, then drives up the price for about five or six months. Then, they slowly drop down as the tail drifts out. When you wait long enough, it shows up in the $2 shelves at the local pawn shop.

Why? Because it maximizes profit.

One of the web comics I used to read (GPF Comics) used to joke about the “married game release schedule”. I don’t buy things on the bleeding edge, or “0-day” if you will. Instead, I buy when the price of an item reached the point I’m willing to pay for it. I make exceptions, writers I know personally get rammed right up to the top of the list, simply because I find that personal connection worth more than waiting until the price drops a couple dollars. Likewise, I like buying books at conventions, though given my personality, it comes down to that personal connection more than them just showing up.

There is a reason I pretend to be an author groupie.

Amazon’s $10 books is a relatively short term plan. I feel they can maintain it for a year, maybe two at most, then things will start to fragment as the needs of the publishers overrides their own loss at profit. They are looking for that desperate critical mass before someone (iPad, Sony Reader, n810) takes over. If they drive away their producers (Macmillian), then they risk losing that critical mass.

Market forces are a powerful thing. Macmillian and Amazon are in the market for one thing. To make money. Both will make decisions that attempt to maximize their profits and, surprisingly enough, there is a compromise in there. And then the third branch of that, the buyers, will put other forces on those items until they stabilize until some new technology shows up.

I also know that I’ll keep on buying books, but now I’ll consider eBooks slightly higher than physical books. Yeah, most people won’t offer it, but it also won’t stop me from “suggesting” that Pakensarrion or Wizard of Earthsea be turned into an eBooks (I’d pay full price for those, period) or those people at conventions selling their self-published works to also sell an electronic copy (I noticed some of the RPG writers did that last year at GenCon). That contributes to the market forces of eBooks and will help hasten the stabilization of the prices, technologies, and how the future of publishing will look like.

So, while I don’t care specifically about the Macmillian and Amazon thing, I think it is the one of the trumpets for the war. I already put my bet in how it will end, but like a good mystery novel, I want to see how we get there.