I’ve gone to great lengths to make writing easier. And by easier, I do mean less complicated and with fewer steps between thinking of the words and producing a finished manuscript. Most of the tools that purport to do that tend to make the process more complicated. Scrivener has too many functions and too many buried features. Word is more UI than productivity tool. Libre Office is trying to be word, so it definitely has too much UI for its own good. Google Docs and other online tools are fine, but they are also not particularly trustworthy these days.

There are a lot of ways to create seamless tiling textures. For years you did it by painting the center of the texture, offsetting the entire image by half on the x and y, and then filling in the empty space in the middle. Repeat that process until you have cleaned up any pixels that give away the boundaries of the tile.

I have been using Obsidian as my main writing tool for a couple of years now. I run it on my iPad, my Android phone, and my Windows laptop (that might become a Linux laptop fairly soon, but that’s another post). It works great on all platforms, and it is simple to sync my work from one platform to another. On the extremely rare occasion when I get a version conflict between two of the platforms it is flagged and fairly easy to correct.

I now have three partial games using my 2D pixel art but is actually 3D polygons setup in Godot. I say partial games, because even though all of them run and you can move around and do things in each of them, not one of them is really a game.

Best Games - Star Wars: Squadrons If a VR experience can make you ill, maybe more of that experience can set you right again. At least that was the hypothesis I was testing when I kept playing Star Wars: Squadrons well past the point where I was alternating hot and cold sweats, dry mouth, and motion induced dizziness. Piloting an X-Wing or Tie Fighter, even in smooth and languid dogfights turned my stomach. At first.

About a week ago I rearranged my whole desk. It’s sort of funny how set you can get, working in a certain way, with things in a certain place. It’s sometimes difficult to imagine that there might be a better way until you move a few things around.

After writing a few new stories, I have to edit them. This is easily the hardest part of writing. Coming up with ideas is easy. There are nearly infinite ideas that other people haven’t worked on, nearly infinite ways to remix the ones that they have, and nearly infinite ways to tell a story based on these ideas. So, yeah, ideas are easy.

It’s no secret that I am into a lot of old games. I’m also into a lot of new games, so it’s not like I think old games a somehow inherently better. Some of my favorite experiences playing games were relatively recent. Nostalgia is a trap that can make you believe the things you once loved are better than anything new. Taken to an extreme, it can make you think that the best times are in the past and we would all be better off rolling back the clock. But that’s more of a political conversation than one about games.

What would you do if you were suddenly attacked by several unknown guys? Since I played Kung-Fu Master, I know what Thomas, the kung-fu master would do. He would punch and kick his way through a lot of unknown guys. Way more than several. It’s a full regiment of unknown guys. Way more guys than would ever fit in the Devil’s Temple.

It’s a holiday for us here today. That just means I’m going to work on some writing and maybe a bit of game dev, but I won’t do a bunch of writing here.

Going through the process of constructively critiquing a lot of work, I think I have boiled my approach down to one simple rule. Now, there are as many ways to critique as there are people, but if you actually want to be helpful to someone’s creative process I think the ways to do that are shockingly few. Pointing out mistakes or flaws isn’t it. Being whatever you think of as brutally honest isn’t it. Stroking their ego isn’t it.

Yep. Still writing stories this week. In fact, I was in the middle of writing one when I left to write this post and I really should be getting back to it.

For the next few weeks I will be working on a small handful of stories. And punching up some others to get them ready to submit. And I will be submitting the ones that are already punched up and waiting. And I will be resubmitting the ones that have already been rejected at least once. And I will be looking for new places to submit stories. And I will be working on game art and code for my own game projects. And I will be creating graphics for other game projects.

Over the next few weeks I will be writing some more short stories for a contest. I will likely have some things to jot down here about writing. So right now I am going to do something a little different. I’m going to tell you about the best joke I have ever seen.

I have an absolutely enormous collection of old games. Literally thousands of them. While I do play a lot of newer games, I also dip into this collection on a near daily basis. It would be easy to write this off as nostalgia, but I don’t think that old games are better than newer ones, or that game development peaked sometime back when I was younger. It’s more that I think a good game is a good game, no matter when it was made. And sometimes a game that isn’t very good might have some aspect to it that is worth investigating. I play with old games, because I play games. All of them.