Oo! Let’s Make a Game! Episode 7: Life During Wartime
Originally published at xenoglyph: the alien writings of designer joshua a.c. newman. Please leave any comments there.
58:34 long & 56.2 MB big
In this episode, Robert Bohl (designer of Misspent Youth) and Joshua A. C. Newman (designer of shock: social science fiction) try out a new way of designing and recording. The show will be going biweekly and Joshua & Rob are going to start doing some design before recording, then discuss it. A great deal of headway is made making up the starting characters and mapping out some of their relationships.
Joshua & Rob’s pre-show work and formal/structured notes written during the episode.
- Joshua & Rob discuss fucking robots and the uncanny valley
- Jenn from Trapcast is happy to “see” us back
- The setup of the protagonists in a pentagram
- Each iteration of the game will have one of the five characters as protagonist
- Matt Wilson’s Primetime Adventures has rules for saying who’s the protagonist on a per-episode basis, and shock: does it on a per-scene basis; Rob presumes that The Buffy the Vampire Slayer Role-playing Game has something to handle a main protagonist with back-ups
- Seth Ben Ezra’s Dirty Secrets also has one main protagonist
- Vincent Baker’s game Synthia
- Emily Care Boss has a game in playtest that adapts Eero Tuovinen’s Zombie Cinema (there’s a Story Games thread post that discusses it very briefly
- Stealing the qualitative fictional rule-setting from Brennan Taylor’s Mortal Coil
- Joshua is reading Not of Woman Born on recommendation from Meguey Baker of Night Sky Games
- Joshua and Rob argue over whether police are just another gang
- A discussion including the film L.A. Confidential and the TV show The Wire
- I spoil the 1991 remake of Cape Fear to make a point
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The intro music is “Gotta Whizz” by Boris the Sprinkler, from the album Mega Anal. The outgoing music is “Life During Wartime” by The Talking Heads.
Incidentally, you can find more information about the header image for the blog post at this article about ethnic cosmetic surgery.