Plotting Talk

I gave a talk on plotting last night at a meeting of York Writers. I was pretty nervous, as many of the writers have been published, and wondered how they would take what I had to say. Thankfully, they all seemed to enjoy it and it fired up some interesting discussion afterwards, which resulted in us running over the normal meeting time.

Because of my years of game development experience, the first part of the talk was about how stories work in games and how we approach the creation of the stories to ensure that they are sound, logically. The second was how I'm bringing some of those techniques to bear for the novel that I'm writing in my spare time.

If I get the time, I may turn my notes into a Developing Thoughts article, though it may be better as a couple of articles. I shall let you know.

More Mr. Smoozles

The second of the new strips with art by Stefano has just gone up onto the Mr. Smoozles site.

It feels a little strange seeing someone else "handle" my characters, but as long as Stefano continues to do a great job I'll be happy.

Re-Introducing Mr. Smoozles

Mr. Smoozles makes a comeback with a new strip today!

Artist Stefano Collavini contacted me a few weeks ago about the possibility of drawing the strip. It's taken him a little while to fully get into the characters (much of that being that I'm a picky sod ove my characters) but we're at last up and running and the the first of the strips he's drawn carries straight on from the previous episode.

Stefano worked as an artist on the game, So Blonde, and when I visited Paris a couple of weeks ago I had the chance to meet him, along with the rest of the team. Unfortunately, because it was a business trip, Stefano and I didn't really get the chance to chat about comics and stuff, so we'll have to save that for another time.

For those who are interested, Stefano alos has his own comic, Through Happiness and Sarcasm, so you can see that he's a pretty busy guy.

Now, all I need to do is ensure that I keep feeding him the scripts...

More Leipzig Photos

Here are some more general photos, but there's one of me and "Sunny", too.

Leipzig Photos

Marek, over at Adventure Gamers, has a photo-article up on the AG site. The pictures are pretty cool and I like Marek's comment about my pockets - where would an adventure developer be without George Stobbart Pockets?

Games for Lunch

The blog, Games for Lunch, has an interesting idea as its basis. Each entry is a kind of small review of a game played for an hour, at the of which the question, "Would I play this game for more than an hour?" is asked and answered.

Let's face it, if a game hasn't grabbed you after an hour of play, is it likely to do so? At the very least, a game should intrigue you enough so that you want to continue playing after that first hour.