Card Game Creation Quest Part 1

The Rundown

I, your humble blog writer, and the group to which I am a part of, FlubberKnuckle Studios, have a plan to release an awesome card based videogame called Flipz.  Our card game started, ever-so-humbly, from a college assignment made by my close friend and business partner, Hawk.  Back then it was a physical card game and made with random graphics taken from the internet taped to the back of playing cards and placed inside of a card sleeve with the picture facing outwards.  The game proved to be a hell of a lot of fun.  Because we haven’t officially released anything yet or even copyrighted the thing yet I’ll hold off on describing the game itself, for now at least.

We’ve been hard at work making the digital version of said card game for well over a year as our studios first foray into videogame production.  It’s been a hard road and the journey has taught us a lot about ourselves and our potential.  I’ve demoed that game a hundred times at least and can say that it’s very faithful to the physical card game which we’ve been perfecting these last two years.  Now, however, we want to pull back a little and go for a different approach than the one we were planning.  We’ve had some changes throughout the group, mainly in how we operate and what we’re shooting for.  We’ve come up with a new strategy and new software to use for Flipz.

Now the first step will be to make the physical card game and release it.  That is our current focus.  We will use Hawk’s prototype and expand it to actual production and we will sell it to as many hobby stores as we can and market the hell out of the thing.  These physical copies will let the purchasers know that pretty soon, they can look forward to a digital copy of the same game.

I will chronicle out steps to production here on my blog for anyone else interested in learning about indie card game production. 

My NaNoWriMo Story Part 5

The Win

Sooooo…I won.  I submitted my story, Average Joe and the Beauty, a whole day ahead of the deadline of November 30th.  I cranked out some crazy production in the last six days thanks to coffee, excitement, and a pure “fuck this I’m winning” attitude.  My chapter outlines kept me focused and on track throughout the story.  I’m so glad that I had wrote them out ahead of time but at the end I had surpassed them and had no time to write new ones so I just wrote from the seat of my pants like many other NaNo “Pantsers” out there.  Admittedly most of this huge production of words was complete crap, stuff I should have erased as I was writing it and I know that later I’ll groan when I have to go back and read this stuff.  The point is that it got done and I did something I thought impossible.

As I was writing this portion of my NaNo story I wondered if I should be more suspenseful.  I obviously decided against it (XD) so I’ll just tell you how the whole submitting process went.  So I arrived at work really early, hours before even the early morning cooks, and opened up NaNoWriMo.org.  On the website I searched the FAQ section.  I had seen that there was a way to “scramble” the words of a submission before it’s submitted for validation.  I followed the steps which was really just using Find and Replace on MS Word to replace all letters with capital and lowercase A’s.  I did this because I am way too paranoid.  Now I will admit here that I cheated in validating my novel.  I hadn’t kept up with transferring my written words into virtual text and had given up before even the halfway point to focus strictly on writing the story out.  Knowing this I simply used my previous novel, Average Joe and the Extraordinaires , to validate this one.  Underhanded I agree but I assure you that I kept very accurate word counts in my notebook.  I took a count after every page and wrote the number at the top of that particular page.  I only validated what I had written.

After submitting my novel for validation I got my official word count (51,816).   I watched the awkward-ish (though charming) video of the NaNo crew and could do nothing but smile.  I felt so damn good.  I downloaded all of the cool winner’s graphics that they put up on the page and marveled at my wonderfully inaccurate word count.  The website shaved off 16 words but what’s 16 words between friends—a lot if my novel was 50,015 words.  After I sat there a while and quickly pondered over the month I couldn’t help but feel sad.  It was all over and I knew what I would do next but also knew that I would have to come out of this intoxicating bubble—this solitary private party—and join all of you back in the real world.  Life demands balance and I desperately needed to get back to mine.

So I was now done and I had won and won big.  What did I win?  A headache I suppose.  A 51,816 word labyrinth that I had to search through to find something worthwhile.  NaNoWriMo doesn’t really give it’s winners a prize but I believe that it does reward winners with something very useful.  The contest rewarded me with the ability to silence my inner editor whenever I want and helped bolster the production of my writing.  I can now put myself in a “NaNo state” at any given time in order to shut all the distractions out and get serious production going.  Towards the end I honestly did see a glaring weakness in the way that I wrote.  I wrote mainly to satisfy my plot with all other elements coming in second to that.  Now I don’t think that this is the proper way to write.  The character should always come first and not just the main character but every character in the book.  Your mains should have an arc and your supporting characters should all have interests and fully developed lives outside of the plot.  If you can find the time you should fully flesh out every character even if you use them once.  Character growth and themes have always been important to me but now they’ll be at the forefront of my works instead of at the background like before.

Now that I’ve won this year’s NaNoWriMo will I participate next year?

I really, really want to!  I can only see myself participating if I have the proper time, workspace, and no other projects looming.  It’s tough to dedicate a whole month to just one thing and NaNo 2013 demanded that I dedicate any and all hours of my life that weren’t already spent at my job.  I can’t do that again.  There has to be a balance.  I can’t run around like I was forced to do this year.  I must start building a proper workspace well in advance of the contest.  I also won’t participate if I’m working on any video or board game projects with FlubberKnuckle Studios.  It’s just way too much work for me and way too much stress.  I’ll know for sure later on, most likely in the middle of next year.

So I won, what’s next?

The next step for me is actually a backstep.  I want to return to my first book and boost the content there and make the transition from Average Joe and the Extraordinaires to Average Joe and the Beauty much smoother.  I want to make sure that the first book is also a much smoother read overall by tuning up the prose a bit, adding more detailed character descriptions (since I seemed to have nailed them in the sequel), and foreshadowing some of the outlandish concepts that I have in the second book.  I think these changes will strengthen the first book a great deal.  The primary goal is to perfect that first book and get it out ASAP.  I’ll most likely learn some HTML too in order to start perfecting the book for Kindle release.

So all in all I love this contest; the pep talks from real authors, the goals, the preparation month leading into the contest, the local writing events, the fervor, and just the basic aspect of man, imagination, pencil, and paper (or Word Processor) all coming together to complete a seemingly impossible monthly goal.  If you haven’t tried a NaNoWriMo yet then I suggest you do.  You just might learn something new about yourself and about your project.

My NaNoWriMo Story Part 4

Overcoming the Obstacles

At this point many of you are wondering what my plan for productivity entailed.  It must’ve been something crazy right?  Not really.  The only crazy part was getting me to leave the house and wait for hours in the cold Michigan air for a bus to get me where I was going.  And where was I going?  Some magical refuge for down on their luck NaNoWriMo writers?  A place where said writer can do intense training in mountainous solitude to improve word count, word quality, and plotting?  Well, kinda sorta.  I just went to the library all the way downtown.  It provided me with some much needed quiet time.  I went to the most boring looking part of the library, the sociology room I think it was.­­­­­

In the library I had no choice but to write, write, write.  I did this for hours on end.  I sat at a table away from mostly everyone.  It took a while to warm up and get back into the world but it did happen and when it did the words were flowing.  It was still crap, I thought anyway but I figured I could change it all when the contest was over.  I settled for changing my whole writing/editing process up just for this book, just for this contest.  I knew that there was plenty of gold buried under all the crappy words I was writing and I figured that later I’d just mine that gold for ideas and improve the structure around it.  It was the most obvious way to do this and quite a few of the NaNo pep talks even said this so I can’t even tell you why it took me so long to actually adopt this process.  It’s most likely because I’m a creature of habit especially concerning my writing.

Slowly I worked on releasing myself from the shackles of my process.  It was mostly psychological.  I’d leave sentences and word choices that I didn’t like in, even though they bugged me.  Soon I was telling myself that I would change it later when I copied it into the computer.  Eventually this encompassed even whole ideas that took up most of a chapter.  I now felt that I could definitely change it later or even pull from each and every wretched idea that I left on the paper and wanted to change.  I was now able to write crap and move on which is a very powerful talent or in my case, becoming a powerful learned skill.

The library helped rejuvenate me and really boosted my word count.  The first day I didn’t get as much as I wanted (a lofty 10,000 words).  I never managed to hit my target on my trips but was steadily adding large increments to my overall word count and the truth was that a lot of the writing was really good.  I knew I was too hard on myself after I’d copy a chapter down into my computer and read through it.  My inner editor had almost killed the contest for me with all this slow methodical nonsense.  Though I couldn’t get rid of the bastard it did feel good to shut him up every so often so that I could unleash the full fury of rapid production.  Now I was in it to win it – hell – I knew I was going to win it.  I had just a week left and had only just hit the halfway mark but I felt that I could really do this with one more push especially with all I had learned.  It’s crazy how much had changed in just a week.

Maybe my confidence was misplaced.  I still wasn’t finished and though I had boosted my word count, that 50,000 mark was still a long ways away.  Why the heck was I so confident?  And what if—just what if—I had somehow reverted back to my production levels of weeks previous.  There was still a lot to be uncertain of with a week left.

My NaNoWriMo Story Part 3

The Downward Slope

This is a period of time that I’m very ashamed of.  It’s a period of time when I felt that I would not complete the contest and would just settle for the headstart that the contest provided me.  This was the point when the writing was unforgivable and my inner editor just wouldn’t let me feel confident about what I was doing.  Not only was my inner editor making me feel like less of a writer but this was also the period I had the most distractions.

I was working long days, in some cases going over my shift or working someone else’s hours.  My initial plan of working through my lunch hour was thwarted by hunger and fatigue.  I sat and ate lunch with my coworkers for most of the month.  I wrote with them around about 10% of the time and by myself about 15%.  When at home my mom wouldn’t really relent on asking me questions that I didn’t think were relevant and soon my nephew was coming over nightly thanks to his new job.  Seeing my nephew is usually a joyous occasion for me.  This time was no different but marked with tremendous trepidation because I knew I would be distracted with him around and lose precious contest time.  I’m not tough enough for this I suppose.  I have trouble just shutting people out.  I can do it for a decent period of time before I start to feel bad because I’m so good at it…which makes me bad at it I suppose.

My writing productivity dwindled embarrassingly low.  I wasn’t even hitting 300-400 words a day and then began skipping days entirely.  The combination and long work days and long bus waits and rides wore me down to the point of not even wanting to write anymore.  It didn’t help that when I did write I thought I was writing absolute shit.  I wasn’t going to win the contest but at least I had a decent start.  At that point I had roughly 15,000 words but I was roughly 2-3 weeks in and now I was just about ready to give up.

I began playing videogames again and watching anime.  I managed to start Skyrim and finish a few quest lines.  I watched all of Gundam 08^th MS team and while both those distractions offered up a ton of inspiration I still was severely lagging behind in word count.  My nephew was also coming over daily with tales of his new job and to play a few games.  He had begun Skyrim (which led to me playing it) and had even bought Grand Theft Auto V just to play on my Xbox.  I was very entertained by his playthrough and we had shared a lot of laughs but again I wasn’t getting anything done.  I liked seeing my nephew because I rarely got a chance to but this contest was really important to me.  I needed to do my best at the very least, nothing else would serve.  So I killed two birds with one stone.  I gave my nephew my Xbox to take home with him and with that made it more convenient for him to play games and increased my word count thanks to the increased focus.

So although I was pretty lousy on production for nearly two straight weeks I still managed to produce at least something.  At that point I wasn’t even halfway done but those small increments kept me in the game.  With my time quickly dwindling down and my production levels so very far from goal, I finally had enough and put my plan for productivity into play.

Special thanks to the wicked awesome distractions of Man of Steel, We’re the Millers, Identity Thief, The Wire, Binding of Isaac, Borderlands 2, and Devil Survivor, along with Skyrim, GTA V, and Gundam 08^th MS Team.  All you fictional entertainment pieces have kept my head out of my own worlds and into yours.  Thanks for helping to make me a lazy bastard!

My NaNoWriMo Story Part 2 ½

The Trials

Obligations

The first week of NaNoWriMo brought plenty of excitement but it also brought its fair share of trials.  I had sworn off all forms of communication with others unless it was an emergency or near emergency but not everyone knew this and I’m a sucker for not wanting to make people feel unwanted for lack of a better word.  I also had a few obligations going into the month that I didn’t or forgot to cancel.  The first of which was a date.  I hadn’t had a date in quite some time so I wasn’t ready to cancel this one.  I also really wanted to reconnect with this person so canceling was out of the question.  It was a fine distraction though and I did actually get a lot of writing done before the date so in hindsight, I had no cause to worry.

Other obligations I had were to my family (my niece in particular), and the videogame studio I’m a part of, FlubberKnuckle studios, not to mention work obligations like a friend REALLY needing me to work a day for them so they could interview for a much needed extra job.

I don’t get to see my young niece a lot so when I do I like to do things for her.  She usually invites me on field trips and other school events with her so if I have time I like to go.  I couldn’t say no this month even with NaNoWriMo looming over my head.  The NaNo gods must have looked over me for the month though because her event (along with a lot of school days) was cancelled multiple times until the next month.

My game group, FlubberKnuckle Studios, is restructuring and focusing on further building our designing skills and so everyone is hard at work learning new software and creating new deadlines for various projects.  Every week we check in with Wednesday conferences updating everyone on our progress with whatever we’re doing.  My goal before the month was to learn the Blender and Unity software.  I started a few tutorials and played with the software but didn’t accomplish much.  With everyone in the group working so hard and taking our deadlines so seriously I felt that I couldn’t entirely shut out my FlubberKnuckle productivity so I continued to build my knowledge of the software and participate in conferences, though I missed two.  What I learned is that I don’t like juggling important tasks like that without a dedicated workspace.  Unless I have a desk and a quiet space to work—in my home next year—I will only participate in NaNoWriMo if I have no other obligations and vice versa.

Life Doesn’t Pause

Distractions, distractions everywhere!  Time I find is such an easy resource to waste especially for myself.  I take life slowly most of the time and like to just stop and think about things, everything really.  I don’t have a space of my own and I don’t own a car so finding that precious quiet time that writers crave is like mining for gold and precious gems.  It’s a task it really is.  I stay in a one bedroom apartment with my mother in an impromptu (what I thought temporary) move to save money.  I stay in the living/dining/now bedroom and my mom likes to watch T.V…a lot.  When I write, I typically write for a stretch and then pause to think about what I wrote and what I’ll write next.  Problem is whenever I pause and the sounds of the T.V. travel over to my ears and my eyes begin to wander in a search for something newer or fresher than the bright whites of my notebook or laptop screen.  It’s astounding how much time I actually wasted absentmindedly watching the crap she was watching at the time.  When I realized how little work I had gotten done it started to piss me off.  My mom is wondrously considerate like myself and I knew if I had asked her that she’d go quietly to her room but that shit wouldn’t have been fair of me so I kept my crabby attitude and tried to work through it.  I knew then that I needed some other work space but it was cold and the buses really ran like shit and I couldn’t think of any decent places to go where there weren’t many distractions around.  There aren’t any nearby coffee shops where I stay, at least any that didn’t require an hour and a half bus wait.

The buses were where I wasted the bulk of my time for the month.  Mostly during my travels to work.  Don’t get me wrong, I still crammed as much work into my bus ride as I could and actually did some of my best work on the coach.  But even writing on the bus proved to be inconsistent.  Getting a seat on the bus (especially the one I catch) is never guaranteed and about 70% of the time I stood up on a crowded coach.  Waiting for the buses alone wasted about 2 to 6 hours out of my day depending on how late they were.  But on the good bus rides I could easily write between 400 and 1000 words because of the lack of distractions (when other people weren’t acting crazy).

The writing itself was a whole other trial.  My plot, I now saw, was not fully fleshed out.  I wrote from the outline but added new details, locations, and characters as I did.  The outline kept changing and the chapters filled out more.  The writing came slowly and I found that I was truly a slow and methodical writer.  I had to pause to figure out every little detail about what I was writing even words and word arrangement in a sentence.  I was entirely too slow. 

So now I saw that if I wanted to win this contest I needed to change where I wrote and how I wrote.  So I brooded on that for a while whilst continuing to try to blot out the distractions at home with earbuds and music which proved only marginally effective.  I knew my next step but it would take a large setback to make me implement it.

Up next, the pitfalls that nearly destroyed my resolve.

My NaNoWriMo Story Part 2

The Month Begins

It was November 1^st and NaNoWriMo was well underway.  I stayed up late the previous night to get a midnight start on the writing and wrote a few paragraphs whilst following my outline fairly closely.  The writing was a bit slow and clunky and I hated the way I phrased a few of my sentences.  I sat and deeply thought about what would sound better like I usually did.  I kept doing that until I remembered what the contest was about and so I stopped editing myself so much and just ran with it leaving sentences I didn’t like behind…unless I really hated them.  My notebook is a battleground of scratched out sentences.

I forsook all distractions the night before.  I unplugged my Xbox 360 and logged out of all my social networking sites aside from email clients.  My iPod was unplugged, drained of battery, and left in the corner of my table because I knew with it that I’d waste valuable writing time on the bus listening to music and staring out the window.  I told my friends via Facebook and a few texts that I wouldn’t be around for the month of November because the contest.  I had a plan and I wanted to stick to it for a few reasons.  My first reason was because I’d never stuck to a plan, schedule, or routine and I really really wanted to break that cycle.  I want to be a much more productive person and I saw this as a major step for that.  My second reason is because I really really wanted to get some traction on this second book while the events of the first one were still in my head and the ideas were flowing.  There was no better time to do it.  So no distractions meant getting things done.

I left out of my house before the sun was even up, around 6:00am.  I wrote a lot on the bus which helped me finish that first chapter which I felt a little better about because of how I ended it.  I made it to work around 7-ish and continued writing.  I wrote in the dark and empty café.  I had my notebook out and was ready to start typing the first chapter up on NaNoWriMo.org.  I browsed the site and learned that you didn’t type out anything on the site itself but instead posted your word count.  You could take your own count or “validate” your novel early which counted the words for you and promised not to be a portal for novel theft.  Eh, I trusted it.  So anyway, armed with this new knowledge I opted to continue my early morning work visits so I would continue to treat this noveling business as legitimate business.  I updated my word count and checked my phone to see if I could do it from there and to my surprise I could.  What a thoughtful team of visionaries, these NaNo people.

I moved my show from the café and the distraction of WiFi to the signal deathtrap of the basement breakroom where it was hot and stuffy from all the machinery and steam pipes.  I began working on my second chapter, writing it down in my notebook.  More inspiration found me in the form of a visit from a cute older lady named Myra.  She asked if I was doing homework and I told her about NaNoWriMo.  She seemed pleasantly shocked and said what I was doing was cool.  She herself likes to write and had been working on something off and on.  I told her that she should just go for it and soon.  If not for the month then just whenever.  She said that she should, smiled, said that she didn’t want to be a bother, and walked off down the hall.  I went back to writing and maybe 10 minutes later Kurt the pastor comes in and asks me what I’m working on and I tell him what I told Myra.  He asks if he could read it when I’m done and I asked him if he had a Kindle or Kindle software so I could send him a free sample.  He didn’t but he gave me his card and well wishes.  That was pretty much how my conversation went with anyone who caught me writing for the next month.

So all in all I was off to a good start.  I had an outline that stretched far ahead of me.  I had a decent place to get my writing done, updating my word count was much easier than expected, and my book was rolling along at a decent though somewhat slow pace.  With a start like that I had no clue that my challenges to come would have me questioning if I should even waste my time trying to finish the contest.

My NaNoWriMo Story Part 1

Pre-NaNoWriMo

This year was my first experience with the super cool and awesomely exciting National Novel Writing Month or as the cool kids call it, NaNoWriMo.  I heard about it towards the beginning of the year and planned on participating at that very moment.  Even better was the fact that I was finishing my first Average Joe novel (I thought, more on that later) and planned to use the month to jump start the planned sequel.  It all sounded so crazy.  How the heck could anyone write a whole book in only a month, a mere month.  It took me at least a year with both Hell Warriors: A Hero in The Flames and Average Joe and the Extraordinaires (AJE), that’s not even including the countless revisions and tiny tweaks I’ve done with both throughout the years.  So, more than anything else, I wanted to see how I’d stack up in the contest with the odds so high and my normal production speed so low.

I created a profile on the NaNo site (nanowrimo.org) months in advance and browsed through the site.  It’s a pretty neat and easy site.  There weren’t a million and one things cluttering up the front page which was great because I didn’t feel instantly intimidated or confused.  Browsing through the site gave me a sense of what to expect from the contest.  I’d check back on the site sporadically for updates like once a month or sometimes more frequently than that.  The main tip than I gleaned from veterans and from my own common sense was that the key to success was to write without abandon, to write as if you were held at gunpoint and the minute you stopped was when the seedy gangster pulled the trigger.

You’re only supposed to care about one thing and that’s your word count.

I finished Average Joe and the Extraordinaires, aka book 1 of the Average Joe series, about two months before the contest officially started on November 1st complete with what (at the time) were my final edits.  So I hooked up with an editor for that and started my idea factory for book 2 which I knew would be called Average Joe and the Beauty (AJB) from a simple idea that popped into my head.  I noted random ideas down in my Quicknotes and References file for the plot and went back to old notes to see what I could use to get a rough idea of what the sequel would contain.  On October 5^th I started an official outline of AJB containing all the rough notes I had previously wrote and some new ones.  I got all the elements together and started working on a basic chapter by chapter outline of the book and where my plot was going.  I gave myself a headstart of about 8 plotted chapters for the next month.  This came from a bit of advice I read from the pre-NaNo emails you get from signing up.  Before NaNo even began I knew that my story would have 2 main POV’s from Joe and Liandra as well as a few villain POV’s because I liked those in AJE.  And I knew how I would begin and what ground I wanted to cover.  What I didn’t know (at the time) was how much my chapter outlines would change because of the choices I made while actually writing but more on that later.

I didn’t have internet and at the time thought you’d have to do all of your writing constantly online so I planned to use the library and my job’s free WiFi (free for me not them) to do all of my writing.  I do my best writing in notebooks so I figured I’d write into the late hours of the night in a notebook and wake up early and copy it all over into NaNo’s online writing software while at my job.  Luckily I did this for one day and saw that you only had to post your word count daily so I was greatly relieved that I didn’t have to kill myself for this but I was very proud of myself for being so prepared.

In my head I was ready for NaNo 2013.  Could I have been better prepared?  You bet!  Even at the time I knew that but I figured I had a strong start and I really did.  I was gung ho about it and felt my chances for “winning” were really good.  I knew the writing itself would be tough, it always fucking is, but I thought “this is good, even if I don’t win I’ll have a helluva start.”  That thinking prevailed throughout the month and was really what kept me from giving up throughout.  More NaNo adventures to come.  Part 2 will chronicle my actual start and the challenges that came from that.

More content to come for December.

I've been neglecting my blog for too long.  Time to add some content for the month.

Personal: My random day

I was out and about doing errands in Dearborn.  I met up with an old friend for a ride then once done with my task I decided to walk back to Detroit where I could catch the bus back home.

After taking what I considered a scenic route, I ended up running out of road to walk on because the service drive turned into the freeway.  I however had already walked a mile and didn't want to walk a mile back so I pressed on.
I ended up walking through tall grass towards a place under the freeway bridge hoping it wasn't another highway as it was fenced off.  I found a path to walk down which led to an opening in the fence.  I walked through and saw tall hills far from me but directly in front was a small muddy stream.  I thought about walking back the way I came because being here seemed like a bad idea but I pressed forward anyway.

Under a bridge to the west I noticed a man and his collection of items.  The man obviously lived there and was making water in the stream.  I quickly walked east, to avoid contact and being sighted by the man.   I was headed towards what I believed to be my destination somewhere near Greenfield.

I observed the birds and insects around noting hawks, geese, ducks, butterflies, and whatever was rustling in the tall grass and in the stream.  I walked on in the hot sun and contemplated crossing the stream because I concluded that I could reach my destination quicker that way.  Behind me I noticed a group of men all on motorcycles quickly approaching on the other side of the stream.  As they got closer I noticed they're all older white men.  That made me suddenly more nervous, a natural instinct.  I watched them pass by and snapped a few photos of them.  Across the stream I noticed more men standing and talking and then noticed some sort of water release gate like in a dam.  Further ahead on that side was a golf course.

I watched the bikers as they bobbed and weaved up and down on the causeway.  I had hoped they would lead me to an exit but those dreams were dashed when I discovered I didn't want wet toes.

I walked on and grabbed a walking stick because a journey aint a journey without one.  I walked nearly a mile down noticing that my way out was barred by tall weeds and a tall fence.  In the weeds some creature stirred, rustling the bushes loudly.  I looked but couldn't find the creature and was glad to keep it that way.

I walked under a quiet little shadowy bridge where I couldn't even spot a bird or any other sign of life besides graffiti.  On the other side of the bridge I had hoped to find an exit and wasn't disappointed.

There were thick weeds all about but in the middle a path was made which made the walking path look more like a tunnel.  I smiled at my fortune and walked up the path which quickly turned into a hill.

I dropped my stick and marveled at the civilization around me.  I now saw where I was, it was some sort of flood control area.  I looked around at the street signs and saw that I ended back at the street I first started on.

"How the hell did I end up back here?  Stupid shortcut!"

My Top 3 Ouya Games So Far

So far I'm enjoying my Ouya.  The truth of it is that they need better quality software for it.  A lot of the games are either shovelware or unplayable and are already saturating that market.  However with free downloads I don't care about that so much.  There are however some pretty solid gems in the lineup.  Anyway here's a list of my top three personal favorite Ouya games:

Shuttle Rush is a timed platformer where the goal of the stage rests in keeping yourself alive.  You play as some type of spacefarer in an oxygenized spacesuit.  At the beginning of every stage the spacefarer's oxygen supply is punctured (in a hilarious animation) which starts your mad dash for the exit.  You can temporarily refuel your oxygen in most of the levels but you must escape to survive.  The levels require tight platforming and, for most, rudimentary stage memorization for success.

+ It's fun, levels are fast but require a lot of thought, there are plenty of levels, there's progression in the form of character upgrades such as a stun gun, tight platforming.

Vector is a 2d platform game that harkens back to the first person parkour game Mirror's Edge (in style and setting) and the old school 2d Prince of Persia games.  Your character is always in constant motion as he attempts to outrun an equally nimble futuristic law enforcer.  Throughout the level you're using buttery smooth and simplistic controls to make your character jump, slide, climb, and 'trick' his way to the end of the level.  There are plenty of hazards like pits and if your platforming isn't timed tightly enough then you'll lose precious time and get caught by the enforcer and tasered which starts you over.

The art style takes a minimalist approach with simple colors combined with black and white characters and objects.  Which is fairly cool and fits the game perfectly.  The animation in the game is top notch too, especially on the special unlockable parkour "tricks" which are actual parkour moves.  I know because I dabbled with the hobby.  There were several moments in the game that had me step back and go like "oh s***!"  A lot of the jumps and obstacles really get the blood pumping.  There is some slowdown sometimes though.

My only hope is that with the sequel they give you more control over the movements and allow you to use the buttons to jump and stuff.  I guess what I want from it is to take a few more elements from traditional platformers but as it is it's definitely solid.

+ Cool minimalist art style, detailed animations, real life parkour techniques and tricks, ramping difficulty, cool high flying moments

ChronoBlade is an arena style beat-em-up with various rpg like items and spells thrown in.  The art style reminds me of League of Legends and so do the main champions.  The two playable characters that I had (not sure if there are more in the paid version) were very unique.  There's a small girl that uses some intricate martial arts in combination with this floating metal ball for some brutal combos.  The other guy is large and uses some sort of twin claw axe weapon and does heavy damage, he can also launch his claws off and pull an enemy towards him.  Both characters have long flowing combo sequences but I enjoyed the girl's play-style a lot more.

The game starts you off in a room full of loot and so you do what comes natural to your videogame influenced mind and reap those resources.  After that you walk to the arena and the combat begins.  It's deceptive because you get your punching bag enemies immediately but then comes boss after boss and enemies that can juggle you and attack through your guard.  It's definitely a hard ass game but the difficulty keeps you playing to win.  It's definitely unbalanced though.  Once I learned what all the spells were I was clearing out rooms of the difficult enemies until I ran out of it and got juggled which took my full health bar to zero.  As unbalanced as it is I still had a lot of fun.  There's also no tutorial here but if you're not afraid to experiment with buttons then it isn't difficult at all to hop right into the action.

+ Unique characters and fighting styles, tight and fun beat-em-up action, plenty of moves and magic

I'm hoping that the Deus Ex mobile game comes to the system.  I'd get that in a snap.

Next Gen Gaming Bonanza at E3

This year's E3 can be described in many words, the ones I choose to use are confusing, drama filled,  and distracting.  We watched as Microsoft put out a barrage of hard hitting titles and other titles that looked good but will probably disappoint (I don't think Ryse will be that good).  They were the masters of ceremony and what they successfully did, at least for a day, was pull the wool over people's heads.  Their rapid fire blast of exclusives hit hard and trumped up a ton of excitement.

I think their smartest move was grabbing up that super polished looking Dead Rising 3 as an exclusive.  Dead Rising as many of you know is a game that I have a mostly hate filled relationship with and one that I am currently analyzing to see why people like it so much.  This new Dead Rising actually got me excited to play with it's overhauled game engine, one that looks very similar to my beloved Resident Evil 6 I might add.  It looks like it might be the systems killer app to me.  Everyone's on a zombie kick and this looks like it'll be in many a household by the time it comes out.

My friends and I were bad mouthing the Xbox One for several days before Microsoft's press event but you wouldn't have known that by the way my friends were talking about Dead Rising and buying a One just for it.  This, along with the rest of the high octane trailers and the excitement on social media sites like Facebook got me thinking.  Did Microsoft just successfully distract people from their horrid gaming model (which from what I'm hearing may not even be that bad but more on that later.)  I certainly wasn't "duped."  I was as salty as ever.  From what I was hearing Sony would adopt a similar strategy for used games and so I felt like I was overall done with console gaming.  This and the Kinect and 24 hour internet check-in debacle on Microsoft's end made me want nothing to do with this "next generation" of gaming.  I felt that they had already started a slippery slope of gamer abuse with our current generation of Downloadable Content in games that weren't finished from the get go and DLC that was already on the disk that you still had to pay for.

I feel that when something gets too big that it never fails to start overreaching and that's what I felt and still feel about console gaming.  To be a console gamer (which I've always solely been) it requires a lot of dedication.  You buy a system that's expensive as hell and you shell out a quarter of your paycheck on new games for it.  Now we all pay an additional $50 or so to join or respective system's online service.  If you have both PS Plus and Xbox Gold yearly memberships then you are shelling out roughly that much for both depending on whatever hookups you may have.  You also pay for your own internet and the additional electricity that these consoles drain.  That's a lot of money.  That's a lot of money to pay for someone else to still have control over what you can do with your product.  I don't believe in that.  I also don't believe that these games that are coming out are worth all this money and effort.  I've been having more fun lately playing my PS2 than I have playing my Xbox 360, that I just got mind you.  I just don't see anything out there on the market that's worth all this hassle and hubbub.  I've preordered the Ouya and am hoping that they do something interesting with that.  The fact that it's so indie friendly and cheap makes me confident that I made the right purchase.

This article has trailed on a bit so I'll write a follow up to this in the coming days.  I need to investigate this whole Xbox debacle anyway but from what I'm hearing the Xbox One's "bad" features are not nearly as bad as we thought, there may even be a way to turn them off but I'll go into that and Sony's funny jabs at the competition and break down their statements.  Like always thanks for the browse!