Kate Kligman

Earlier this year I made a personal pledge to set aside more time in my life for reading. I also had a secondary goal: to become a better reader.

I started out by suspending my Audible account. For the past decade most of the fiction I’ve consumed has been through audio books. I’m still keeping the account and intend to use the service in the future, but this year I wanted to spend more time actually reading instead of listening.

After going through the few books I had in my apartment and on my Nook and Kindle, and a couple months of dragging, I searched online through social networking sites and review services to see what was out there. This proved to be a good strategy and I found quite a few indie authors who I wouldn’t have otherwise. It kept up my overall interest in the project.

I also found the books were easier to read electronically. I discovered the larger the font size on the display, the more quickly and accurately I was able to read through a book. I’m still experimenting with this, and my display is quite large now. At any rate, I’m delighted to have increased my overall reading speed.

I’ve decided I’m going to focus the rest of my summer reading time on indie and small press books. I’ve always enjoyed independent works (I used to buy them on Lulu) and 2013 seems to be a good year to come back to it.

I’ve just finished the excellent noir novel Coldwater by Diana Gould. I loved it. I don’t usually read noir or crime fiction, but I decided to give this one a try.  The book is not only dark but it reads like a TV show, and I don’t think I’ve felt so floored by anything since I watched all four seasons of Battlestar Galactica in a single month.

So in short:  This book is dark, deep, and exciting, and I want to watch the TV show this isn’t based on. I hope to see more from Diana Gould in the future.

Now vanquished at 62:53 seconds. It also unlocked Hexagon Hyper Mode at difficulty level Hardester.

This is a video of Super Mario 64 being played without textures. The lack of textures make the gameplay appear spooky and remind me of footage from a more recent game called Antichamber.

I was very lucky to see a screening of the movie Blancanieves tonight at Variety with the SF in SF group. The movie is a Spanish retelling of Snow White presented as a black and white silent film. This style worked really well and after the first ten minutes I became so involved in the story I forgot about the novelty of the format.

For the story itself Blancanieves is very sad.  The movie is entertaining, and it’s even hopeful at times, but it has plot twists that reminded me strongly of Pan’s Labyrinth. I don’t know if this is typical with this genre of Spanish movies, but I’m interested in learning more.

There’s a fantastic new indie game out in beta right now called Don’t Starve.  It’s a survival game, and the title is good advice, as I forgot to eat several times while playing a character searching for food and shelter.

The game is rogue-like, and the goal is pretty simple: survive as many days as possible, through summer and winter seasons, without starving, being killed, or being eaten by a grue. Yep, during the day/night cycle the night is deadly around the midnight hour without a light source. It has a permanent death feature, but this is offset somewhat by resurrection altars that can be found or built. There’s also a sanity meter and if it gets too low the player starts to hallucinate and the world becomes more sinister.

Right now I’m waiting until the beta is a bit more finished before I resume playing again. The game is presented as a sandbox with a plot, but it doesn’t seem far enough along to figure out the story. Overall it reminds me of Nethack, Minecraft, and the art style reminds me of Tim Burton’s movies with a bit of Caroline.

I’ve spent the past two days playing an indie game I discovered at GDC called Super Hexagon.  It was a 2013 Independent Games Festival finalist, and I think I enjoy it because it reminds me of the demoscene.

I found this funny clip of a video blogger having a meltdown while playing Super Hexagon for the first time. He isn’t acting, I had the exact same experience when I played.

As of this post the furthest I’ve gotten is Square on mode Hexagon. How far/long have you survived?

I’m at the 2013 Game Developers Conference this week in San Francisco. This will be my second year attending the conference (recently, at least) and I’m very much looking forward to the events opening tomorrow.

The Independent Games Festival and Game Developer Choice Awards ceremony is presented tomorrow night and I’m happy to see FTL: Faster Than Light on both the Choice Awards and IGF nominee lists. I hope it wins the Seamus McNally Grand Prize, and at least one of the Choice categories it’s in.

I had a light day today, but on Monday my favorite panel was ‘Obsessive-Compulsive Development: A Postmortem of the Development of Retro/Grade’ with Matt Gilgenbach from 24 Caret Games. When I began developing last year I was determined to have fun and maintain a healthy balance with my day job and personal life. This presentation was a reminder of the consequences of not doing this, and reminders are good in this respect.

I also enjoyed a Kickstarter statistics panel by Thomas Bidaux. He presented the numbers well — video games enjoy a 30% project success rate — but I felt he didn’t emphasize that some projects should fail and the importance of asking for a realistic amount needed to both produce the project and keep the developers happy. For example, it’s easy to succeed if the amount asked is too low (ex $1), and I think ‘winning’ at Kickstarter shouldn’t be the first goal of the campaign design, it should be the project itself.

They are:

Beetle Juice – A Minecraft Roller Coaster

and

A JavaScript Nintendo emulator — it can play Contra!

Game Developer’s Conference is also next week, which could technically make three.