Art of Fading Light

 As one of my few OMGAM microgames that actually has art, I wanted to give a little attention to it.

The game is about an interstellar starship that follows most of the constraints of our current understanding of physics, though it doesn't necessarily spell all of that out in the text.

The design of the ship its self is a kugelblitz or "black hole starship" design, first imagined by Arthur C. Clarke.  Hawking Radiation from a Kerr-Newman black hole is somehow harnessed and used to propel a rather mind-bogglingly massive ship between the stars at rather immodest speeds.

Tri-fold Map to the Stars

My April 2019 micro-game submission for OMGAM also did triple-duty as a submission to the itch.io Pamphlet Dungeon Jam and Mapemounde.

This means that it is triple-packed with some rather clever things, but it also suffers quite a bit in the compromises it had to make to satisfy the criteria of length, format, and content.  Which is a bit of a shame, as I think there are some kernels of really great ideas in here.  I will probably provide an updated version in the near future, to add some traditional A4 sized PDF instruction sheets.

The basic premise of the game was inspired by Revelation Space by Alastair Reynolds, and by the seminal sci-fi RPG Diaspora by VSCA.  The player is in control of a tramp space craft, traveling the stars at near-light speed by virtue of some sort of unspecified exotic engine.

Art of Paper Birds

In a previous post, I said that I wouldn't unpack the specific details of the art choices that went into Paper Birds.

It has been on my mind a bit since then, so I'm giving it a bit of a treatment today.

This was for the Emotional Mecha Jam, so I wanted the art to be both martial and sad.  This was also heavily influenced (as previously mentioned) by the 1965 Nuclear War board game, so some of that Strangelove style dark satire worked its way in, too.

Cozy Copyright Infringement

Look, first of all, it is fair use.  The cover art is original art, distinct enough from the source of inspiration to constitute transformative change.  The references in the text are homage.

The Jam

For this ongoing series on OMGAM2019, we are looking at March's game.  This coincided with the #CozyGameJam hosted by Riverhouse Games.

Cozy games are a really interesting niche.  Most of them aren't particularly ludographic (by which I mean that they tend to lack the sort of mechanisms associated with gamification: quantification, scores, or any sort of strict resolution system).  They tend to be conversations, journaling exercises, or crafty sorts of things.

Real Sums

With Apologies to Pat Benatar

In a landscape of competitive ideas, nomenclature is often the first battlefield.  I'm not writing this to challenge existing ideas, but to re-frame their default assumptions.  Competitive, non-default, second-class ideas ideas often are forced into prefixes that identify them as such:  Non-.  Anti-.

When we talk about Game Theory, "zero sum" suggests the wrong things about default assumptions.