Weather Factory

I feel like I’ve spent most of this week – like the rest of my Twitter bubble – gawping incredulously at the collapse of the British political landscape into a sort of sinkhole of xenophobic narcissism. If you need a roundup, Michael Gove has one for you below.

APART from that:

• I’ve been in Vancouver, at Pocket Gamer Connects. I had not, in fact, told them I’d left Failbetter, but they still let me do my talk. It’s about Mr Eaten, and slides are here. Thank you, Lottie, for making them look less like arse than my original approach, which drew on the immemorial left-brained ‘like arse’ tradition.

• I took half of one day off the conference to write the outline for the Choice of Games thing I mentioned. It’s turned into a Zelazny homage. You’re a sleeping immortal power-in-exile who hears that the bumptious machine which exiled you is dead. So you begin a progress or pilgrimage or odyessey across the desert to get home, gathering armies and deciding what to do with the people who are silly enough to try assassinating you.  It’s a fairly typically Kennedy ‘how far would you go’ story: it’s not that hard to conquer your homeland, but it’s quite hard to conquer it without working with hateful people or fucking the whole place up. LIKE YOU MICHAEL GOVE I’M LOOKING AT YOU. Anyway the outline is in the hands of Choice of Games now, so I’ll shut up about it for the next few weeks until they get back to me. It’s called IRON ROAD at the moment, though I’m still not sure I like that name.

• I had cocktails with Nicholas Vining of Gaslamp Games, who is a funny fucker and pleasantly nerdy with it. I’ve been holding off their Clockwork Empires game, which looks marvellous, until it’s out of EA, but it nearly is now. We commiserated about the unpredictability of indie game development and actually, do you know, I’m going to DM him and say does he want to do a quick interview on this blog, because he said a bunch of interesting things, I’m not sure exactly which ones are good for public consumption, and apparently if you do a blog you’re supposed to put interviews on it so people will read it. Whatever HELLO.

• and – I hope – I’ve got a bit of work lined up with a studio I really like. I literally put forty hours into a game they put out, the week before I unexpectedly started talking to them. If the contract gets contracted I’ll say more next week.

• My daughter made me lemon drizzle cake; she’s the best

READING: Steven Pinker, Seven Words you Can’t Say on Television
WRITING: Cultist Simulator, possibly SCROOY.
DRINKING: I asked for coffee and they gave me hot chocolate what the hell is this I’m going back to England