Stefan Gagne's Fiction Factory

25+ years of novels, games, and other creative fiascos.

Archives for June 2013

coa//011 has a mad tea party

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I was thinking this’d be a pretty thin week for content since the last one was HUEG, but we’ve actually got some meat to chew on. Let’s get started.

coa//011 New Scenes

Insert the Friends theme here, with an eldritch twist. Kelsey goes looking for answers and gets a little more than she bargained for. Or takes a little more than she bargained for, if you want to look at it that way.

I’ve got big plans for the revelations lying juuuust out of reach here, but it’ll have to wait for another chapter.

Create-a-Thing Challenge Extended

It’s double sudden death overtime! To encourage the folks who had ideas but ran out of time I’m extending the deadline one week. The new deadline is July 6th. If you love the stories, create a thing! Any thing. Art, writing, poetry, music, cosplay, hand puppets, doesn’t matter. I’d love to display the things you create!

Streaming Ahead

I’m taking a week off work from July 15-19, and I’m thinking of making my week project there be to stream some video games. I try to be entertaining in my streams despite being horrible at games, so tune in! I’ll announce the broadcasts on my various social media streams, or you can follow me on Twitch.TV directly and get emails when I’m live. Sometimes I even livestream my writing, so even if you’re not into games, you may wanna get on board for that.

Next week, probably wrapping up coa//011 with a big finale! And posting the C-a-TC things! ALL THE THINGS. (Of which I will hopefully have more than three.)

SimCrossingCraft

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First up: Create-a-Thing. Go and create a thing. It’s not as hard as you’d think! Deadline’s a-comin’! (But I’ll take things past the deadline. Just not for Fabulous Prizes.)

Now, let’s talk vidyuh gaems.

In my Social Media(tm) today I opined that if someone made a mixture of Minecraft, the Sims, and Animal Crossing, I would physically die due to malnourishment and dehydration due to sudden onset of game addiction. Folks have asked me for specifics, so here I shall provide.

Good Stuff From Animal Crossing: I’d want dynamically generated but interactive and personable NPCs, a wide range of item collection with theme sets and uniques, minigames and sub-goals such as working towards a construction project, a dynamic world that changes with seasons and special events, a friendly and approachable concept, little emphasis on combat.

Bad Stuff From Animal Crossing: Little environment manipulation, ridiculous cash grinding, busywork and upkeep.

Good Stuff From The Sims: The ability to optionally design your town’s inhabitants and domiciles, intricate house design and management, interactive furnishings, AI which wanders around doing things, emphasis on interpersonal relationships, goal structures, UGC and modding to keep the game expanding.

Bad Stuff From The Sims: Endless micromanaging of Sim needs, indirect access (you’re more an overlord than a participant), later games reduce your ability to custom-tailor your suburb. Oh, and EA’s terrible mindset, which lead to The Sims Freeplay (where the grind is death and there is no AI whatsoever and NPCs just go and have a seat unless you order them to do something)

Good Stuff From Minecraft: A fully featured but simple crafting system (giving you something to do with resources you collect), incredibly modifiable environment, great self-expression and personalization, simple to play.

Bad Stuff From Minecraft: Clumsy and boring combat, “bang you’re dead” moments erasing all progress, no goals beyond the ridiculously long term and combat-intensive Ender Dragon.

So, Overall, I Want… the approachability, personality, and collection based fun of Animal Crossing with the interpersonal dynamics and house design of The Sims and the environmental manipulation and crafting system from Minecraft. I don’t want grind, micromanagement, or survival combat.

If anybody makes a game which has all of that, I am a dead man.

coa//011 has an open door policy

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Let’s do a news rundown this week, shall we? Plenty to yammer on about.

coa//011 New Scenes

And a heck of a lot of them, too. This is a pretty large-scale update, because while I COULD have cut it off early and saved some scenes for next week, it wouldn’t make much sense from a flow perspective. Next week may be a bit short as a result. Meanwhile enjoy the WTF? moments from this particular lump of storytelling, and let me know what you think!

Create-a-Thing Challenge

One week left on this! Everybody who enters gets free anachronauts stories and can pick from a pile ‘o Steam games I have handy, if they like. I’ll accept anything creative you want to make, so get crafty! It’s not too late to do something neat.

Tumblr!

Yep, I haz a tumblr now. I’m going to use it as another release channel for the story updates, with a twist — to make them nicely rebloggable I’m including a paragraph or two from the update, like the teaser on the back of a book. Can’t do that on other social media, no sir. Only on yer tumblrs.

Hot doings in the City of Angles lately. The doings are hot, indeed. If you’ve got any suggestions for how to make them hotter, let me know; I’m all ears. Doings can always get hotter.

coa//011 establishes connection

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New readers — welcome! This blog is where I set up feedback threads for the latest draft story in progress. Every week, I post new scenes! Right now I’m up to story #11. You should probably start at story #1, though.

Current readers — Kelsey Jones is ready to sit down and tell you her story. And it’s a pretty crazy story, which quite appropriate in her case.

Getting this story out was like pulling teeth. I haven’t written something so free-floating and hazy and nervous and frightened since Sailor Nothing; there’s definitely parallels here  in how Kelsey deals with her world and how Himei does. The easiest way to go would be to tell it from 3rd person and let the narrator stay distant, but this feels like a very personal story from someone with a skewed perspective… it’ll have more impact being told in her own words.

Since I missed last week (my life has been kinda crazy with ups and downs) I decided I’d post this a day early for your weekend reading enjoyment. Let me know what you think in the comments below.

Don’t forget, the Create-a-Thing Challenge wraps at the end of the month. I’m looking forward to seeing what you’ve got!

e3 2013: sony

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Well, this is surprising.

I was figuring I’d be sitting this console generation out. But Sony stepped up to the plate and gave me a HUUUUUUGE pile of stuff I actually want to play! The heavy, heavy emphasis on indies and original settings and low emphasis on tired genres really helps here.

Dropping the bomb that they will NOT be using any sort of authentication or control scheme? That’s the icing on the cake. And I’ve always admired PS+, their subscription service, for actually providing something for the money… unlike XBox Live, which just takes away the no-multiplayer restriction and expects you to be satisfied.

So let’s do the math.

  • PS4: +Used Games +No Authentication +Playstation Plus Based Freebies +Gaikai for Backwards Compatibility +$100 cheaper! -Gotta pay for multiplayer now (+4)
  • The Order 1886: +Steampunk +Original -Shooting (+2)
  • Killzone: -Gritty -War -Shooting (-3)
  • Drive Club: =Meh -Driving (-1)
  • Infamous Second Son: -Gritty +Original (0)
  • Knack: +Original +Stylish =Meh (+2)
  • Dark Sorceror: +Amazing Tech Demo -Not Actually a Game (0)
  • Transistor: +Original +Stylish +Fun! -Also coming to PC, so whatev (+2)
  • Don’t Starve: +Original +Stylish -Also PC (+1)
  • Mercenary Kings: +Original +Retro +Stylish +Fun! -Also PC (+3)
  • octodad: +Original +Stylish -Also PC (+1)
  • Secret Ponchos: +Original +Stylish (+2)
  • Rays the Dead: +Original =Meh (+1)
  • Red Barrels: =Meh (0)
  • Oddworld: -Remake +Fun! (0)
  • Galaxy: =Meh (0)
  • Diablo 3: =Meh (0)
  • FF15: +Stylish +Fun! (+2) And a better title.
  • Kingdom Hearts 3: +Stylish -Nonsensical Plot (0)
  • FF14: =Meh (0)
  • Assassin’s Creed IV: =Meh (0)
  • Watch_Dogs: -Shooting +Original +WANT TO PLAY -Also PC (0)
  • Sports Montage: -Sports (-1)
  • Elder Scrolls Online: =Meh (0)
  • Mad Max: -Shooting -Gritty +WHAT (-1)
  • Destiny: -Shooting -War -Gritty +Original (-2)

FINAL SCORE: 12, with 16% of ’em being shooting games. (I don’t count the indie games which involve guns because they aren’t the kind of yawner AAA shooters I’m talking about here.)

I’m flabbergasted, honestly. I was expecting draconican game policies to be in full effect here, because Sony wouldn’t want to be out of that particular party. Looks like either they never planned that or they changed their minds after MS got roasted.

Either way, this console is delivering more experiences beyond the dudebro set, and has a proven track record promoting indies and new experiences. So… yeah. I think I may actually go for this. I really think I might.

e3 2013: microsoft

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Can’t fit it in a tweet. So, here’s my rundown.

I’m already not thrilled with the Xbone, and this is coming from someone who had a 360 and PS3 and ended up gaming on one and watching movies on the other. I would have been happy to roll over into the next generation, if it wasn’t being aggressively marketed in direct opposition to everything I want in a console.

Don’t care about TV. Don’t care about sports. Don’t care about social media sharing. Don’t care about dudebro gritty brown realistic shooters. Don’t care about shooters of any stripe, honestly. Don’t care about war, don’t care about drivin’, don’t care about any of this.

I mean, let’s quantitatively break this down, with (-) negatives, (=) apathy, and (+) upsides. Because math is fun!

  • The Xbone Itself: -TV Focus, -DRM, -Social, -XboxLive, +Cloud Games, +Hardware (-2)
  • Metal Gear Solid 5: -War, -Shooting, -Gritty, +Stylishish (-2)
  • Ryse: -War, -Heavily Scripted QTE Setpieces (-2)
  • Killer Instinct: =Nostalgia (0)
  • Sunset Overdrive: -Shooting, -Zombies, +STYLE!, +FUN! (0)
  • Forza: =Meh (0)
  • Quantum Break: -Shooting, +STYLE!, +Concept! (1)
  • Spark: -Overpromising, +STYLE!, +FUN! (+1)
  • Crimson Dragon: =Meh (0)
  • Dead Rising 3: -Shooting, -Zombies, -Gritty (-3)
  • Witcher 3: =Meh (0)
  • Battlefield 4: -Shooting, -War, -Scripting, -Gritty (-4)
  • Below: +STYLE! (+1)
  • Halo: -Shooting, -War, -Gritty (-3)
  • Titanfall: -Shooting, -War, -Gritty, +Robots, +Innovative (-2)

FINAL SCORE: -15, with 57% of ’em being shooting games.

I don’t think Sony’s gonna do much better, though. The chances of them not embracing the same anti-consumer measures that Microsoft is embracing are low; if this is what game publishers want then they won’t be satisfied with only one of the two big new consoles offering it. Maybe Sony will be less draconian, but there will still be a dragon involved, no doubt.

The only hope is if Sony pushes harder on the indie front, delivering innovative and interesting new games that have distinct visual style without overloading the bullet points with bullets. We’ll see. I’ll post again later tonight with my thoughts there.

In the end… I’ll probably just ditch the new generation completely and stick to my PC. Steam and the Humble Store are consistently delivering interesting things and new concepts I want to play. Guess I’ll get to save money in the end by not buying a new plastic appliance.

housekeeping

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Generally, I crank out one City of Angles story a month — sometimes less than a month, as was the case with //010. In between stories I tend to take a week off, because preproduction work on these things can be kinda brutal.

In this case, I’m working on a Kelsey focused story. Why? ’cause you guys demanded it in that readership poll! Also, hey, I like writing Kelsey and there’s a lot I can accomplish here towards furthering the world and the plot of the series. But writing Kelsey is tricky, particularly when you’re doing it from 1st person perspective as I’ve chosen to do it. The plot itself is also a tightly interwoven thing with new character revelations and such… and all of that takes time to figure out.

So, this week I’m taking off. I have half of one scene done and I’d rather wait until I’ve got more to show you.

What else is on the plate, meanwhile?

Well, the Create-a-Thing Challenge is still on. It’s closing on the 29th, so if you’re making some fanart or fanfic or a song or getting a pile ‘o cosplay duds together, you’ll want to wrap it within the next twenty days.

Progress continues on the Vol//001 book. Editing and cover art are underway and will take a chunk of time but I’m still on track for a September release.

Otherwise, my life’s quite packed; games, media, social occasions, day job work, and more. I occasionally yammer about such things on my Twitter, saving the blog for story-related stuff only, but if you wanna see more of that here, I’m game! Let me know.

I’ll see you guys next week with a fresh start of a fresh story which is going to be unlike anything you’ve read so far. Overpromising? Hells yeah! Let’s do this.

coa//010 makes its stand

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Let’s make this post short ‘n sweet.

First some artsy notes — we’ve got new artwork up for Milly and Lucas! And don’t forget, the Create-a-Thing Challenge is still rollin’. Free retail stories and games ahoy.

Second, here’s the big finale of //010. Will the overly complicated subterfuge of Marcy Wei and Gus Zero work? Will the Alphas leave them alone? And if not, how will they get out from underneath this death threat? Will the obvious twist be too obvious? Read on and find out. When you’re done, there’s a shiny comment box below in which your thoughts are a welcome thing to be typed in!

Next week I’ll either take a week off, or will be starting //011. It’ll be a Kelsey and Dave story! I’ve got the basic plan done, but not sure if it’s ready for me to start putting the thing in writing yet. We’ll see.