July 2013
July 24, 2013
Month 34 Report
Tapping this into an iPad & feeling like an asshole cuz I’m on a beach next to a sweating rum & coke & surrounded by beautiful glistening young bodies.
Misery, it appears, loves company.
This report’s gonna be a short one, so here’re the bullet points:
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Taken a month off partly cuz I can afford to—shocking as we near 5 years without a paycheck, but still wholly true—& mostly cuz I can’t focus for shit with my life packed into cardboard boxes & turned upside-down in preparation for the exodus from Vancouver.
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Revised edition of Ambia waiting on final approval of new cover art, will publish very soon.
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Built & discarded a dozen half-baked Twine experiments.
I was gonna expand on those points but I’m being dragged into the ocean for some “frolicking”, whatever that is.
See you in a month.
I’m more of the “teach the baby to swim by throwing it into the river” school of game development.
July 31, 2013
Refn on “The Pitch”
Nicolas Winding Refn’s answer to the question “When pitching your movies, what have you learned that you should & shouldn’t say?” from Summer Talks: Nicolas Winding Refn, “Only God Forgives” adapted for videogames:
What you say is “I’m gonna make a lot of money” because that is what it comes down to in the end.
There’s a list… that’s a great way to think about survival in the entertainment industry:
- You make great videogames that make a lot of money.
We all aspire to that, most of the time it doesn’t happen.
- You make good videogames that don’t lose money.
You can survive on that for the rest of your life.
- You make good videogames that lose money.
That’s like Russian Roulette but with 5 bullets in the revolver, because very quickly you’re gonna run out of options.
- You make bad videogames that make a lot of money.
But it’s just a commodity then, and nobody cares. There’s no pleasure in the industry of that behavior.
- You make bad videogames that lose money.
That’s not even a consideration.
Those are the places you can be, and no one likes to lose money, so you can go on forever as long as you stay on the right side of the line.
So you tell them what they want to hear.
And the less money they have to give you, the greater the chance that they’ll make their money back sooner.
So figure out the least you need to make your videogame.
It’s all about money, in the end.
Meaning: if you don’t lose money, you can sustain yourself.
Here’s the video that was extracted from. Lots of gold, & insight into Refn’s process which could be helpful to all the poor folks who go into his films unprepared & leave disappointed.
Creation & consumption are two wholly different acts, with the second relying not a whit on the first.
2013.07.01 – 2013.07.31