Kickstarter Trials and Tribulations

The last two days were a bit of a rollercoaster over on the Haunts Kickstarter page. I made an announcement about changes to the game's focus and content, and did so in a decidedly unclear way that led a number of supporters to feel justifiably upset and concerned. It took me a lot of back and forth and thinking to realize that I hadn't made myself understood very well at first. And then there was a lot of constructive feedback from supporters that helped me chart a new path forward that most everyone seems happy with. 

The big takeaway for me was that it's easy to forget that not everyone knows what you know. I wrote that we were cutting back the single player story a lot because we are - by comparison with the sprawling, overly-ambitious, and impractical vision I'd originally had for the story. But none of the supporters had any idea how crazy-complicated what I'd been planning really was. What we're actually going to do is not very far off from what they were expecting (ie, something reasonable and fun). So they thought I was giving up on doing even that much, which was never the case.

Anyway, things seem to have worked out for the moment anyway, and it's a good lesson for me about clarity and thinking about things from the audience's point of view and answering the questions they're likely to have rather than writing to respond to my own internal monologue. 

Trivialities 2

Trivia again last night. We had a good first round and then kind of tanked in the second. Yet we still would've won, or at least tied for first, if we'd gotten the last question right. As is so often the case, we managed to come up with the right answer and then talk ourselves out of it and turn in the wrong one. In retrospect, I don't know why I ever went along with the idea that there are more Old Navy locations than there are Sears locations.

No real stand-out, interesting questions from last night. I guess I didn't know that the town where the Twilight novels are set is called Forks, which isn't very interesting. Although one of my teammates did indicate the name by pointing to a fork on our table. I wonder if that's how they came up with the name for the town when they founded it? Let's see what Google says...

Hmmm - the town's chamber of commerce web site has a whole Twilight section! http://forkswa.com/twilight/

And there can't be much to worry about there, since the official town site's Current Issues page hasn't been updated since 2010, when there were three hot issues, including this one:

Support of the Forks Beautification Committee. Council Members Mike Breidenbach and Bruce Guckenberg are assisting Marsha Yanish, Bill Sperry and the rest of the beautification committee in their efforts to make Forks “sparkle” for our Twilight visitors as well as our residents.

So, yeah, Twilight and stuff. Big deal there, just like the trivia question suggested.

Thing I Learned: Washing Machines Are Computers Too

So, my washing machine stopped spinning, which means it wasn't really cleaning clothes effectively. I went to the place I bought it and they turned me onto a fellow from Frankfurt named Tim who they recommended. Tim came over the same day I called him (yesterday) and had a look at me busted GE, top-loading washing machine, which is only a few years old.

I anticipated some sort of opening up and messing with screws and gears and motors and stuff. Tim opened it up, and plugged it into his laptop, which then told him what was wrong with it. The computer said something was wonky with the motor, maybe, but like any computer, the first step was to reboot the thing. 

Tim rebooted my washing machine and it now totally works. How do you reboot a washing machine? He showed me! Unplug it, let it sit for a minute, then plug it back in and during those first 30 seconds, open and close the lid 7 times in rapid succession. There's a little magnetic sensor in the lid that makes a connection when its closed, so cycling that connection 7 times resets the mother board.

I just learned that.

Rick Played: Through the Ages

Friday night, Brian and I played Through The Ages, a boardgame where each player creates a civilization from its early days and sees it through to the modern era, competing with the other civs to score the most Culture Points and thus be named Bestest Civ of them All. 

It's a very highly ranked game on Boardgamegeek.com, and it's by one of my favorite designers Vlaada Chvátil (of Space Alert, Galaxy Trucker, and Mage Knight fame). I think it probably is a really good game, but it's also very finnicky. I've played it twice now, once the simple version and once the advanced (still haven't played the Full version). Brian and I enjoyed ourselves, but we kept thinking we must be doing something wrong.

In some cases, we totally were, but we figured those mistakes out mid-game. As we were packing up, we both talked about how it felt like we'd made some basic, fundamental error. I got online after he left, and discovered that, no, we'd gotten everything pretty much right (except obviously the mistakes we caught ourselves). I think then what we maybe got wrong was the strategy, especially in the early game. I don't think we were using out population as much as we should've been, maybe because neither of us upgraded our farms. There are a lot of moving pieces and mechanics to this game, but we both want to play again, with at least a third person, to see its full potential.

Steam: Greenlight

Steam's Greenlight initiative/storefront/thing launched yesterday, and I think it's a pretty cool idea. I'll let them describe it:

Steam Greenlight is a new system that enlists the community's help in picking some of the next games to be released on Steam. Developers post information, screenshots, and videos for their game and seek a critical mass of community support in order to get selected for distribution. Steam Greenlight also helps developers get feedback from potential customers and start creating an active community around their game as early in the development process as they like.

The exact number of votes to get a game for sale on Steam remains a moving target, which makes sense, because the voting base should (hopefully) grow over time. It provides for a weird but useful mix of inputs - first-look interest in a game from people who've never heard of it combined with concerted and organized up-votes from the game's aready existing fans. There are a number of games on there I've seen on Kickstarter, so I assume those folks are reaching out to their backers and asking for votes. Or at least they should be.

Obviously we're going to give this a try with Haunts, hopefully sooner rather than later.

In related news, I used to really like that show, Project Greenlight, about funding indie movies. I did not, however, like any of the three movies that got made because of the show.

Trivialities

Every Wednesday I am part of a pub trivia team. We tend to do pretty well, usually in the top 3 out of 15 or so teams going into the final question. The final is where you can bet up to 20 of your points (we had 69 points going into the final last night, 1st place had 71, last place had 45 or so). Basically, with that many teams, you have to bet it all to hold your place. We notoriously mess up the last question a lot more than we get it. We did not put the following food brands/companies in chronological order from the date they were started/launched:

Wheaties

Chiquita Banana

Burger King

Hamburger Helper

That's the right order, we had the last two switched.

We did get the halftime question right, though. Name the four most commonly spoken languages in the United States:

English

Spanish

Chinese

French

I was part of an ill-informed minority pushing for Portuguese instead of French for some reason. I just got it in my head that it made more sense, based on zero actual knowledge. That's something I have gotten better about seeing in myself. A year ago I might've argued for my wild-ass guess, but now we calmly consider things and when nobody knows for sure, we vote. And that usually gets the right answer.

John Paul Jones

He of the famous, "I have not yet begun to fight quote," supposedly shouted to the captain of the British vessel Serapis right before serious hardcore boarding action began between the French-crewed, American-commanded ship Bonhomme Richard. His real name was John Paul, but he added the Jones when he fled from Tobago to America because there was a price on his head (maybe unjustly). 

I seem to recall seeing in some coverage of the new Assassin's Creed 3 game (which takes place during the American Revolution) that there's a way to board ships and throw down explosives into the hold and blow them up. This, it turns out, really happened in the engagement between the Serapis and the Bonhomme Richard. One William Hamilton, according to The Glorious Cause by Robert Middlekauff, "dropped a grenade through one of her hatches into the loose powder cartridges. The explosion that followed killed at least twenty men and wounded meny others."

I found this naval-combat centric trailer for the game - it shows the main character shooting a pistol into the hold and causing an explosion, which probably wouldn't really work even a little bit, but it does make naval warfare look pretty thrilling.

I should do something with this space...

And so I will!

I'm planning on doing a lot more with this moribund site of mine. I was going to use it as a test bed for trying out Squarespace 6 (this site being on Squarespace 5 I discovered). It turns out that S6 is a whole other platform and you need to make a new account and site and migrate your content over.

That's really annoying.

I'm sure there are legitimate technical reasons, but it's the last thing I have time to mess with right now. So I'll stick with good old version 5 for the time being.

Yes, I'm still making a game. Haunts. Well, me and four other people. It's absorbing a lot of my time, as well it should, and it's coming along pretty well. I'm not going to talk much about that here. Here I think I'll talk about other stuff that's fun and interesting - books, games, other stuff. I don't know. Maybe something else, like "What I Learned Today." We'll see! But I want to try and post every day for the month of September, and right now this is like a practice lap.

What did I learn today? Well, it's only 7:45 am, so, not much. I did watch Pawn Stars while eating breakfast, so according to their little post-commercial trivia thing (sponsored by Newcastle!) Marilyn Monroe said kissing Tony Curtis was like kissing Hitler. Most days I learn more interesting things than that though.

Woman in Black and other Horror Musings

Over at Mob Rules, I posted a piece yeterday about The Woman in Black. Check it out!

I've been delving more into horror movies of late, mostly because of Haunts. I came up with this ambitious scheme to have the single player campaign in Haunts mirror the history of horror cinema. That entails learning more about said history, which is interesting. The first book I read on the subject was really more of an overview than any deep analysis. It was nice for what it was, but provided little deeper insight, especially in the movies of the past few decades. 

Right now I just downloaded Interactive Nightmares by Mark Butler. It's about the history of horror video games so, clearly it's a must read. It's also available to read for free through te Kindle Lending Library, so that's how I got it. I have to say, I'm really enjoying that feature on my Kindle Fire. So far, I'm pleased to see that Interactive Nightmares seems very up to date and Butler seems passionate about the subject, so I've got high hopes for the rest of the book. 

I'm setting up a movie-watch list for myself so I can go through that history of horror cinema in person. We're planning to do some sort of book-club like thing on the Mob Rules site, but for movies, so I want to have that all planned out sometime in the next week or so. I'm flying out to LA in two weeks and want to load up my Ipad or Fire with some horror movies, but I think I'll need to stick with the earlier, less bloody features - I'm try to be considerate of the sensibilities of my fellow passengers. Almost all the movies are available on-demand or streaming, but there have been a few exceptions, like Suspiria, which would definitely not be plane friendly.  I might have to reactivate the disk-rental part of my Netflix for the occasion.

How I'm Like Agathocles, Tyrant of Syracuse

There aren't a lot of similarities between me and the rakish and daring total jerk of a troublemaker from the 4th Century BC, Agathocles, sometime Tyrant of Syracuse. Unlike him, I have no intentions of starting a war with Carthage or invading North Africa.

HOWEVER, I am like him in that when he invadaded Carthage he burned his ships upon landing in enemy territory so that he and his soldiers could not retreat and like him I'm going to burn my old clothes that don't fit me anymore. Except I'm going to actually give them to Good Will and not burn them. But as far as having them in my closet and thus available to wear ever again, I might as well be burning them. 

Thus I am the Tyrant of My Closet. The pic shows the clothes I'm metaphorically burning on the shores of the Mediterranean. 

A couple days ago I went to buy clothes and found to my surpise and delight I now wear a size 36 pants. I literally don't remember when that was last the case - presumably sometime in high school. I know in college I wore a 38. So, I bought some jeans, some pants, and some shorts - two of each in fact, along with, wonder of wonders, som XL instead of XXL shirts. It feels soooooo good.

A while back in early to mid 2011, as I was putting weight back on, I ended up being too fat for even my normal XXL t-shirts I'd been wearing. I shame-facedly bought some XXXL shirts from Walmart. That drove me to diet a little better then, and I fought my way back from like 285 to 275, so my XXXL days were relatively short. I definitely want to have to face that nasty, shameful self-loathing again if I ever start to put on the pounds I've been working so hard to shed, because it's a great motivator (one of many). Thus my decision to get rid of all these clothes that are now too big for me - I don't want to have anywhere to hide.