I’m naturally a very reserved person, so posting to this blog or social media happens to be a challenge at times. Attending Metatopia over the weekend, I was repeatedly advised to drop these old habits and take to social media more, establish a rapport with fans. Naturally, the next thing I did was lose my phone charger and spend the next day without an internet connection. Regardless, I’m resolved to inform people about what’s going on in my life a bit more, and get into the habit of documenting everything (interesting) that I’m going through, primarily through Twitter.
To start with, I’m still an MFA student at the NYU Game Center, so my attention is split between Against the Wall and my thesis game, a project called Asterisk. Now, Asterisk was designed to be as close to the opposite of Against the Wall as I could manage: It’s a networked multiplayer 2D space shooter. I’ve posted a few times on my other blog about it, but posting there is like painting a picture and locking it in a drawer. I’ll need to put up a dedicated Asterisk blog soon enough.
Just keeping myself active, busy, and my mind on more than one project. The alternative laser-focus has been detrimental in the past, I need to be able to switch off between things. This need to create a variety of things was what brought me to the Game Center in the first place. I’ve become a better designer through practice and experimenting with other forms, and have access to amazing advice from Bennett Foddy, Frank Lantz, and Clara Fernández-Vara.
So, in the past two months, I’ve taken AtW to IndieCade in the NYU tent, submitted it to the IGF, learned and experimented with networked multiplayer code (not for AtW), and started developing an actual story-centric tabletop. I’ll write another post this week on the game plan going forward, and probably expand on what I’ve been up to.
