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The Bridge

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There's a period at the beginning of every new project when you can see the beauty in your creation, but nobody else can. It's like beer goggles, but without beer. Art goggles. It's just a matter of fact: you have the beautiful idea, but it's locked inside your head. You start to build a replica of that idea in the real world, and for some period of time, nobody else will be able to see what you see. Your closest friends will be politely encouraging, but you can tell the difference between genuine enthusiasm and socially-mandated support. People who aren't shackled by a need to maintain your friendship will be more blunt. During this phase, you will need to be an endothermic entity - you can't rely on a patch of sunshine to warm yourself, you've gotta generate the heat yourself. It's exhausting, and you will be plagued by self-doubt. You'll be lonely. If the thing you're making is also meant to pay your bills, all these feelings will be intensifi
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The Pitch

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 Dan and I are working on a new project, and I'm excited about it.  Here's the elevator pitch: it's a four-player extraction FPS in which you play as a letter carrier for the Pan Galactic Postal Service. Due to overuse of FTL drives, rifts in the fabric of reality have become a feature of everyday life, with entire neighborhoods becoming immersed in Plasm, a nacreous ooze that seeps into our dimension from another, far-less-hospitable realm. The Plasm is inhabited by hostile entities, and exposure to Plasm mutates living things in our world. It's icky stuff, but it's the price we have to pay to get fresh strawberries delivered from the garden colonies of Wolf 359. A recent uptick in Plasm activity has forced the citizens of the Galactic Hegemon into lockdown, but that doesn't apply to essential workers, including the dauntless employees of the PGPS. Your mission is to deliver parcels to their proper addresses while navigating a gauntlet of mutated monstrosities,
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Watershed

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Here's the definition of "watershed":     1. an area or ridge of land that separates waters flowing to different rivers, basins, or seas.     2. an event or period marking a turning point in a course of action or state of affairs. It's also, coincidentally, the name of the building where I and a few dozen other developers worked on a game called Kerbal Space Program 2. I really loved that office - right in the heart of Fremont, a block away from the Burke-Gilman trail on Lake Union. Of all the memories I'll take with me from my time on that project, the most vivid will be of the summertime meetings, the "walk-and-talks," that took place outdoors on the trail. Those are happy memories. Of course not all of my memories from that project are happy - for nearly seven years, I helped to push against a boulder of tech debt and procedural complexity in service of a vision that I felt would culminate in a great game. A big part of my job was to communicate - bot
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Is This Thing On?

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My last post here was in 2015. Returning to this page, I was a little surprised to discover that it was even still online, or that blogs were even still a thing. Perhaps they aren't really anymore? I have no idea. It's pretty interesting to see how many of the links on this page are now dead. The world has moved on. When last we met, I was in the late stages of learning that Nonplayer #2 was not going to provide the magic leverage to turn comics into a full time day job. Given the unsustainability of my schedule back then (drawing the comic in the wee hours of the morning while having a day job and raising a kid), it really was a hail Mary situation -- I'm not even really sure what form I thought the deus ex machina would take. Maybe Nonplayer would get turned into a movie? Maybe I could pivot to Patreon? In the end, I had to stop out of sheer exhaustion.  I didn't give up. I started a spread for Nonplayer 3, and then stalled out. Here it is: I pivoted to writing, and g
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