Category Archives: News

I’m presenting at the Charlotte Writing Project Fall 2024 Conference on Sep. 19!

I'm presenting on (the evils of) generative AI at the Charlotte Writing Project Fall 2024 Conference on Sep. 19!

My talk is titled, “Dada, Animal Crossing, and ChatGPT: Can We Ever Write Our Own Stories With the Master’s Tools?” If all goes well, I’ll be teaching an audience of mostly educators how ChatGPT works at a high level (it’s a fancy Markov generator) and why they shouldn’t use it (it serves hegemony).

If you can’t make it to the conference, I’ll be sharing my slides afterward and am open to doing similar talks elsewhere!

You can get more info on the conference here.

Fusion Time Released!

I’ve put out a new game! It’s a GM-less tabletop roleplaying game where the players are a team of people with special powers defending their home. When their interpersonal clashes grow strong enough, an opponent attacks, and the players will have to Fuse in order to fight back and protect their home.

I’m calling this a “playtest” version, a sort of early-access thing. It’s fully playable but I haven’t done pretty formatting or figured out illustrations or anything. I’d like to see if I’ve missed any issues and if anyone’s even interested in the game at all before I do work to lay out the book in detail.

There’s more on mechanics and acknowledgments on the game’s store page, so check it out! There are even free community copies there for queer folks and/or people of color who don’t feel able to afford the game. Additionally, if you’re in media (including being a streamer) and want a review copy, or would like me to facilitate a game session for you, let me know!

Check out Fusion Time!

You may have noticed that I’ve released several tabletop things lately and relatively few video games. One of the main reasons for this is that it’s simply less work: both media need design and testing, but I find it quicker and easier to write up and format a rules document than to code up and create material for a video game. That said, I’m still working on stuff over at Future Proof Games, and you can keep an eye on this space for more.

Oh! And for more on my thoughts around the concept of fusion in media, check out my post on one of the game’s major influences, Steven Universe: “Everyone Should Watch ‘Alone Together’“.

Tabletop Garden: The Great Molasses Flood

Over at Tabletop Garden, we’ve just started airing a new campaign! It’s called “The Great Molasses Flood”, it uses the Rosette Diceless system I helped design at Future Proof Games, and it’s a great place to start listening if you haven’t yet checked out my actual-play podcast of short campaigns about interesting characters with a critical agenda.

“The Great Molasses Flood” is a weird-fiction story where we take a real historical disaster that was entangled with issues of class and ethnicity and examine it through the lens of strange sci-fi. I really like how it turned out! “Ego Driver”, the previous campaign, was a lot of fun and explored some cool stuff, but I really like “Flood”‘s more personal feel and the way that things go off the rails in the second half.

Check it out! If you like it, I would very much appreciate support on my Patreon account. You’ll get new episodes a week in advance and also get access to behind-the-scenes material; I did an hour-long postmortem on “Ego Driver” that went deep on my intentions and reflections on the campaign, and I plan to do the same for this one.

I hope you enjoy “The Great Molasses Flood”!

Tabletop Garden: Ego Driver

We’ve finally completed the most recent campaign of my actual play podcast, Tabletop Garden. In “Ego Driver“, a group of misfit killers participate in a postcolonial road war in a postapocalyptic world. It draws from Mad Max: Fury Road, Trigun, Danger Days: The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys, and Wacky Races. I’m super proud of how the campaign turned out, despite an embarrassingly long hiatus in the middle while I struggled with my own mental health issues.

I’d really love it if you checked it out, and if you like it, shared it with your circles. You can start with the first episode:

If you’d like more insight into how I planned the campaign, or how I feel about it looking back, you can sign up to support my Patreon, where I’ve just published over an hour of postmortem retrospective discussing things like how the players shaped the narrative and how I now feel about the extensive Michael Jackson references:

Become a Patron!

I’m real pleased with the story my players and I put together, and I’m looking forward to sharing the next campaign with you soon. It’s currently in recording and editing, and if you want a sneak preview, check out the end of the postmortem above!

All My Flash Games Now Downloadable With Source

I’ve released all my Flash games as locally-playable SWFs and Windows projectors on itch.io! That means that they should remain playable even after browsers and Adobe stop supporting Flash. These represent three years of my career, and they were pretty prolific ones!

Get all my Flash games on itch.io here!

If you’re interested in seeing the source code or resources for the games, you can get it for most of them1 by paying $5. If you want the source for more than one, it’ll be a better deal to get my whole Flash Source Code Collection for a flat $10.

Sometime soon I’ll get around to updating the game pages on this site to feature Itch widgets, like so:

I’m very happy to have these games available again without requiring players to enable a deprecated plugin. If you’ve wanted to support certain Flash games of mine directly, this is also a good way to do that! You’re welcome to donate a bit when you download one, although I don’t expect that of anyone.

If you’re wondering what’s been going on with me, I’ve gone into some detail on my Patreon, which I hope to revive in coming months: Become a Patron!

Let me know if you have any thoughts on this release, or if you run into any problems. Thanks!

Show 1 footnote
  1. I haven’t released the source for the games repackaged by Future Proof Games.

Tabletop Garden: New RPG Podcast

I’ve started a new podcast! It’s called Tabletop Garden, and it’s an “actual play” show where a rotating cast plays tabletop roleplaying games and talks about them.

Tabletop Garden is an actual-play podcast where we collaborate on short, self-contained stories about interesting characters, and we do it with an agenda. Throughout each campaign we discuss values, techniques, and how to play with intention.

Our first pilot campaign uses Mechanical Oryx by Grant Howitt to tell a tale of looming violence in the solarpunk postapocalypse. During each campaign, episodes will release weekly. Check out the show at tabletop.garden.

Tracery Live Released

I love the work that Kate Compton and others have done with generative/procedural art. One thing I’ve missed, though, is the ability to just link to a quickly-made thing. Specifically, I’ve done things like specify the naming structure of alien species for a roleplaying game using Kate’s tool Tracery, but there’s no easy way I’ve found to just link to an arbitrary Tracery grammar without spinning up a server or making a Twitter bot or something similar.

So I made one.

Tracery Live is an open-source Tracery front-end that stores your JSON source code in a query string, so that you can load grammars without any back-end storage needed. It supports HTML and various other supportive techs. You can paste in an arbitrary Tracery grammar or edit it directly on the page. Here’s Tracery’s Night Vale example for a sample of a lengthier end result.

This really is, like many software projects, a bunch of techs slapped together: George Buckingham’s Node version of Compton’s Tracery library, Nicholas Jitkoff’s itty.bitty.site approach using Nathan Rugg’s JS implementation of the LZMA compression algorithm, and the is.gd URL shortener, glued together with the unnecessarily-bulky-for-this-purpose Ember.js framework and hosted on GitHub Pages. My thanks to everyone involved.

Check out Tracery Live on GitHub Pages.

If you have any feature requests or bug reports, let me know in the GitHub issues or in the comments.

“The Majesty of Colors” Remastered and Released

In 2008, I made a game called “(I Fell in Love With) The Majesty of Colors.” It got played millions of times, won awards, and is still recognized by many people I run across randomly.

In 2016, in part as a response to the impending death of Adobe Flash, we at Future Proof Games announced “The Majesty of Colors Remastered”, a rebuild of the original game in Unity with enhancements. We estimated that it would take a few months.

Today, two years later, the game is finally released on five platforms: iPhone/iPad, Android, Windows, Mac, and Linux.

Buy The Majesty of Colors on the App Store Get it on Google Play Get it on itch.io

Every game release is scary for a different reason. One of the reasons I’m nervous about this one is that “The Majesty of Colors” is real short, and we’re asking money for it. Even on mobile. In the end, our estimate wasn’t far off; it took the two of us a few person-months of actual work, but that was spread over two years of working at day jobs. Even with the low price we’re asking, it will still take tens of thousands of sales to “break even,” making the game pay for itself. It’ll take even more to make a profit, supporting more steady work on future games and maybe even justifying further enhancements like extra interactions or (no promises!) more story.

We’re tentatively buoyed by the response to the game we’ve gotten so far today. Folks are excited, and we’ve gotten some press interest and are hopeful for more. But “The Majesty of Colors” is a work very close to my heart, and I’m still afraid that its time has entirely passed. We’ll see.

I’ve written this in various places over the last few days: thank you for dreaming with us.

Headless Swarm Released

Headless Swarm” has landed.

It’s the first season of paid story for Exploit: Zero Day, our cyberthriller puzzle game about social justice hacktivism. The game’s still in alpha1 but buying “Headless Swarm” will get you immediate access to the game, the free season of story “Black Echoes,” and the first couple of jobs in the new season.

Our living story approach to plot in Exploit: Zero Day means that we release story gradually over time during the first run of a season. It means that you get to play story sooner and lets us adapt our approach as we see how story is received. “Headless Swarm” will be nine jobs in total, released over the coming months and all included in the single purchase.

This storyline is pretty cool, I think! It focuses around a real, scary hacking technique and explores the growing ubiquity of drones, the effect cyberintrusion and hacktivism can have on society, and how corporations use the fear of cyberattack to collect power. I’m also proud of the new characters and organizations we’ve written: Kilroy-sama is weird and silly, OnyxHorde feels like a good balance between sinister and contemptible, and Shay Oakes legit creeps me out. I hope players enjoy it, too.

Check out “Headless Swarm” here!

Show 1 footnote

  1. With free access given periodically through our newsletter.

Exploit: Zero Day – Headless Swarm Landing December 1

For years I’ve been working at Future Proof Games with my partner Melissa on Exploit: Zero Day, a cyberthriller with living story where you roleplay as a hacktivist by making and solving puzzles that represent computer systems. It’s been in closed alpha testing for a while, but on December 1, 2016 we’ll be releasing our first season of paid story: “Headless Swarm.”

You can read more about the release and the game on our announcement blog post, but here I’ll just say that I really hope people check the game out and spread the word about the release. Even if you don’t want to buy the season right now, please sign up for the newsletter and you can get free alpha access when the season comes out. Make some puzzles, play the free story, and let us know what you think. And if you like it, consider picking up “Headless Swarm!”

With everything going on in the world right now, both Melissa and I want to feel like we’re making a difference. We’re trying to do that in a bunch of different ways but one of them is with Exploit: Zero Day. We want this game to be a way to explore difficult moral topics and modern technological ethics and encourage players to think hard about them, especially if they’ve never done so before. The more people hear about the game, the more successful we can be at that.

Please let your friends know about the game! If you’re press or a streamer, please reach out to us for free media keys on distribute().