I was fucking around in a part of Melbourne called Fitzroy until after midnight when I realized that I had an abstract but more or less functional map of the town running as a background process. It was blurry, but the lines were all in the right places; it was all a matter of increasing the resolution. So of course we had to leave in the morning, right as I was getting it all dialed in.
Australian troll game is pretty strong, cryptozoology coupled with just the right proportion of fact: my favorite was the story an Enforcer told me about a lesion you can get from a bite that grows more lesions on top of the existing lesion. But I haven't seen any of the spiders I'm supposed to watch out for. The only spider we saw of any kind was a Spider Roll my mom got in some laneway sushi hole, and honestly we were happy to see it.
While at PAX Aus I talked to somebody from Satellite Reign, the inexplicably unfunded successor to Syndicate. I don't know if it's Kickstarter fatigue, or if I am the only person who remembers Syndicate, or what. But I like what they've got to say - I backed it earlier today. Which is probably still your tomorrow, because globe.
There have been a couple fairly high profile delays in Kickspace, but as somebody who has made things even a thousandth the complexity of a retail game I'm pretty impressed that any games get made. I wouldn't say that somebody else shouldn't be mad, as they paid in on what is essentially a broken promise. But, again: every subtle force in the universe conspires against the creator.
Of the larger format RPG Kickstarters, Shadowrun Returns is really the first to "graduate." There are a few at various scales, but this is one of the biggies - the sort of triumphant return crowdfunding is said to enable. I don't really have a machine capable of playing it here in Sydney, though I do like to imagine opening the redemption field and typing in the code. I'm going to be watching the reaction very closely, though. Resurrection is a complicated business.
Part five of Sand is up, also. It has been a lot of fun trying to dress up the high school aspirations of the young men that we were, maintaining the spine of their idea while making adjustments to things like fringe length and distressing other aspects just so. But we're also competing with them in a way, asynchronously, competing with ourselves, which is the creative drive in a nutshell, really.
(CW)TB out.
