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Added more words here. Not much to say about it. Well I suppose I can say this, editing is going to be a whole thing. New scenes, moved scenes, redefined relationships, expanded descriptions. I've gone over a lot of writing advice that says you have no idea what you are writing until you have written it, and holy cows is that ever true.
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Some slow progress here. I also went back through the first two chapters and made some notes about things that I will change on an edit pass. There are at least 4 scenes that are in completely the wrong spot and quite a lot of fleshing out to do, but hopefully it's salvageable. I suppose I will only know that when I get closer to the end.
Some edits here, but first I want to get to another story that I did some work on.
I sent this one out for feedback twice, made some edits, sent it out again, and then made some more edits. I think it's approaching something like a final form. I could probably dive back into anything I have written, disassemble it and improve it, but I think this one is close enough to done that I even gave it a title. You can read All the World Sings With You , a short character study about a man with a truly terrible super power. On the longer story front (still no title) I was pretty hung up on one scene. I wrote the stuff around it to try to have it make some sense, but nothing I did made it work right. I wrote about 600 words, deleted that, wrote another 1000 or so and still the whole scene sucked. Finally, after thinking about it for a couple days, I deleted the whole thing and replaced it with a couple of lines. It will need an edit pass, like everything else, but I already like it so much better. Best Games - Landmaker A few years before developing Landmaker, Taito released Puzzle Bobble, one of the best action puzzle games ever made (which I, sort of, wrote about here). The shadow of Puzzle Bobble is immense. It’s hardly any wonder that Landmaker gets overlooked when people are compiling lists of the finest puzzle games of all time. Is it as criminally overlooked as Uo Poko or Puzz Loop? Probably not, but still Landmaker deserves a place in our collective memory. Released in 1998, Landmaker takes the color matching puzzle game and gives it a unique twist. Instead of matching blocks to clear them, you match the blocks to make increasingly mammoth structures. Firing a block with the same color at the leading point of one of these structures will dissolve it and any other matched blocks touching it. If you thought all of that sounds sort of familiar, you wouldn’t be too far wrong. On the surface Landmaker operates like a lot of other color matching puzzle games. You could try to play it like that, clearing any blocks you can as soon as you are able, but from level 2 on that would be a short road to a game over. Landmaker doesn’t want you to clear those blocks. In fact building them up into monolithic chunks of similar color is more valuable. You see Landmaker is competitive by design. If you aren’t facing off against another player your rival is a deviously difficult AI. The playstation version of the game has a single player puzzle mode, but the less said about that the better. Landmaker is designed to be played competitively, and the only way to get an edge on your opponent is to build bigger and bigger things before smashing them down. The larger the collection of buildings you destroy on your side, the more junk will rain down on theirs. Then there are the special blocks. Instead of granting the player a bonus as soon as you clear a larger area, Landmaker drops the specials right there on the board. You can shoot a block at them to activate them, but until you do they will sit there on your board, taking up space and being a general pain in the ass. It’s the ultimate risk reward mechanic. How many games make your success a potential liability that you have to plan for. It might sound frustrating, but actually it’s brilliant. When all is said and done, Landmaker is a fairly simple game, but so is checkers. Similarly, the true depth of Landmaker doesn’t start to unfurl until you have played a few games of it. Pretty soon you will start to look for ways to slide blocks behind other blocks, or leave some garbage blocks right up at the edge of your failure line so that you can build larger structures somewhere else. It doesn’t just reward speed. Planning two or three blocks ahead can unleash a greater assault on the other player than simply clearing everything that comes down the board at you. Landmaker is one of the best games with one of the best names. Don’t take my word for it. You should probably just play it, or watch this video. |
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Owen McManus