About time…

I suppose I should start doing some blogging again, this last half a year apparently became a sort of unscheduled break. I had plenty of other things on my mind, didn’t feel like writing.

Starting to sell World of Near

Today I updated our English website a bit. You can now order the new book there, for instance. I probably should do some more updating as well this weekend, before leaving for Gencon – for instance, I still don’t have a proper resources section in the Solar System / TSoY pages.

A Blog Recommendation

I don’t read many blogs – I have enough in my hands reading my correspondense and a couple of forums. I’m also pretty bad at reading recommended linkages, but I do make the effort. Some time back Joshua Bishop-Roby linked me to an excellent blog. Then I just read the article he linked, but during my first annual State of the Blog address yesterday I went there again, and man that’s one amazing blog!

State of the Blog Address 2008

This is something I’ve been meaning to write for a while now, but being that I barely have the time to write anything else, it’s been postponed. What is? Why, the State of the Blog Address, to commemorate me having blogged for a whole year now. I’m celebrating the occasion by retagging and recategorizing the blog contents to make the structure reflect the contents better – hindsight is so much better than foresight at this sort of thing.

My Gencon

Ho ho ho, as some of you might already know, I’m going to Gencon this year. (That assumes that they don’t have to cancel because of their bankrupcty or something, of course.) One big reason is that I’ve wanted to participate in the Forge booth for a long time, and for some reason I have this feeling of closure, that if I don’t go this year it won’t be pertinent next year anymore. (Perhaps I’ve just let too many years pass without going or something.) Another reason is my most fine and excellent zombie game (still only in Finnish) I’m going to produce for the English-language market and publish at Gencon. A third reason to go is that I was thrust into the role of republishing The Shadow of Yesterday by surprise, which is more than enough reason to go shop it around like a mad elephant.

Back with news

Ho hum, a human is a busy creature, and apparently the first thing I cut when I’m busy is blogging. This is a fortunately non-pressurized medium, though, perhaps because of the singular publication model: no need to edit, print or publicize yourself when you want to write. Nice.

Anyway, as a brief explanation for the latest month-long silence, I offer thee this. In other words, I’m going to Gencon this year with the Forge booth if everything goes well. There’s quite a bit of planning involved with all the flight plans, hotels and, foremost, preparing products for the convention. I’m going to perchance discuss my products in greater length later either here or some other medium, for now it’s sufficient to say that I’m being pretty busy writing and producing the games I want to sell at Gencon.

I’m still hoping to write the blog as well during the summer months, though. The first order of business is to write more extensively about different flavours of fantasy gaming, which topic has stood open for a while now after my latest post. A big topic, but I’ll tackle it soon.

New Blog!

Ha ha ha haa, I started a new blog in Finnish. The name of the blog is Bear Blog and it’s quite cute. I’m doing it at wordpress.com once again, for I’m pretty happy with WordPress. The new blog is going to be about Finnish topics and stuff that has nothing much to do with game design, such as politics, religion and philosophy. We’ll see it in action during the coming months.

Back from hiatus…

If you can call a month’s break a hiatus, anyway. I’ve been plenty busy with all seven kinds of projects ranging from typical whitecollar slaving to preparing for Tracon, one of my favourite Finnish conventions. Apparently blogging is one of the simpler things to set aside when you’re busy, so here we are.

It should make sense that after not writing the blog for a month I should have some interesting topics. At least they interest myself:

• I read the entire oeuvre of Vaskikirjat, a Finnish indie fantasy publisher. Pretty interesting, I’ll be writing about it a bit later. Erkka Leppänen, the publisher, has good taste.
• I’ve been playing a lot of Fantasy Flight Games boardgames, which basically means large Ameritrash games with  lots of pieces. Something useful should be said about those, I think.
• I’m almost done with Zelda: Ocarina of Time, which is apparently considered one of the best adventure video game titles of its generation at the end of the ’90s. I was mired in low quality computer gaming at the time, which perhaps explains why I’m just playing the game with determination now. Some interesting notes presumably forthcoming.
• As the readers of this blog know, I’ve been working with “adventure gaming” lately, which then became the topic of a lecture I gave at the aforementioned Tracon convention. Some folks have asked for written notes, which I’ll probably put up here at the blog at some point.

As for when I’m actually going to write about the above topics… well, we’ll see. Hopefully soon.

Short Guide: cultural grants – Finland – gaming

I was looking for blogging topics, and got a constructive suggestion: why do therapeutic writing when you could be writing something somebody might have an use for? To that end, I’ll write about a topic I probably know better than most other game designers. Namely, how to get cultural grants for your game projects here in Finland. I’ve written some successful applications for cultural grants during the last couple of years, most lately for a little game club here in Northern Savo. It’s a good way to get some loose money for culturally significant projects otherwise on the edge of profitability.

More Computer Game History

OK, of course I couldn’t let it lie (actually, Jari couldn’t; there’s a guy who can’t leave a job unfinished). Now that I’ve expanded my list of “essential games” to an unwieldy length, I can perhaps forget the whole thing, secure in the knowledge that I’ve probably caught most games in my target segment. Certainly there’s some obvious additions like the excellent Star Control space opera games, as well as some not so obvious ones, like 4D Sports Boxing, one of the first playable 3d fighting games. I also got a couple more recommendations for my list of games to play in the future! Of course, now I have to put that list on a separate page of it’s own if I ever want to add anything else in the blogroll.