I did not click 18,700 times.
Hello darlings. Contents:
1 - I was a teenage fan artist.
2 - On fake nostalgia: illustrating The Hourglass Sings.
2.5 - Interlude - No, I didn’t name the puppet.
3 - How to dispose of a copy of Dance Dance Revolution Ultramix 2 (2004).
4 - Everyone in my Discord server is cooler than me.
1 - I was a teenage fan artist.
“Transformative works” is the special, grown-up name for when people love a piece of art so much, they create their own.
I have always loved fan art. The first time I ever joined an online community, I was freshly 13, thrilled out of my mind to find comics and art dedicated to the fantasy media that I loved, too.
I adored the amateur art and writing; made no distinction and placed no caveats. Art was art. I once read a piece of fan fiction out loud to my eighth grade class. It was the kind of thing with random humour about sporks and penguins.
In retrospect, this is deeply embarrassing. But it was a very long time ago.
When I turned 14, I would begin creating my own fan works.
On a cobwebbed back shelf of an aging art website, you can still find my gallery. The art is ectoplasm, really: weird, messy, embarrassing tailings, left behind by the ghost of a kid that doesn’t really exist anymore. The ghost of a kid learning how to draw; learning what online friendships meant; learning how to share and love art. The page is a shrine to the past.
But at the time, it was also a shrine to The Legend of Zelda. There are dozens of pictures: art and comics of a world I was obsessed with.
Earlier this year, it became very apparent that the kid who spent hours making Zelda fan art still existed. He’s still me. In April, I rallied together 11 other game designers, and all of us created tabletop roleplaying games in tribute to The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask. People made beautiful, thoughtful games.
My love letter is called The Hourglass Sings.
The Hourglass Sings is not a Zelda game; it’s a tribute. The game echoes the themes and feelings of early 3D Zelda, but not the characters or places. It is not a Zelda game in part because I enjoy not being sued by Nintendo, and in part because I wanted to make something of my own.
It’s also not finished.
Don’t get me wrong! You can download it, read it, play it, feel feelings and tell stories. But there’s an important thing that’s still very much a work in progress: the art.
2 - On fake nostalgia, or, how I illustrated The Hourglass Sings.
In the same way that I wanted to make a game that felt like Zelda (but wasn’t, really), I wanted to make a game that looked like Zelda (but didn’t, really).
The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask is a deeply weird game. Among its many quirks and experiments is its unsettling visual design. The game came out right in the bleeding edge of early 3D game design: its spaces are all sharp angles, strange textures.
I love the surreal quality of these spaces and this art style. I would have loved to emulate it! But I am not a 3D modeler, and I’m not going to learn Blender to illustrate a tabletop game*.
But there’s more than one way to hold an N64 controller, and I can make you see Zelda in other ways. So my game uses pixel art.
All the art for The Hourglass Sings is drawn on a 110 × 170 grid of pixels, which is later scaled up to a full 5.5 × 8.5 inch page. Each one begins with a sketch.
After the sketch, I start to block in colours.
This is around where I start to get nervous every time. It’s empty, it’s visually confusing, it’s unfocused, it’s scratchy! I have to ignore that voice until details come in, which is when magic starts to happen.
I knew I wanted a few things from this project. First was a limited palette. Each piece of art uses a subset of 15 colours. The small palette helps give a sense of authenticity: digital cameras don’t need shutter sounds, but the click sounds right when you hear it.
A small palette means I need to use repeating patterns of pixels to sell the illusion of a coherent scene. This is called “dithering,” and it has a long history! Older computers only had so many colours they could display, which left dithering as a clever workaround.
This piece for THE DARK’s playbook uses dithering to make a sky gradient, patterns of pixels repeating upwards. The reflection on the ground also uses dithering, from yellow to red to purple to grey.
People have asked if I “hand-made” the artwork for this game, and… yeah! The dithering is too fine to be machine-generated; the pixels are too big to hide much. Still, I can use the paint bucket to fill in big areas, and I can choose where details matter and where they don’t. I did not click 18,700 times making each of pieces.
Once THE TOWN is finished, I’ll have met my minimum scope for the project: one full page piece of art for the cover, one for each of the three playbooks, and one for the playbooks section itself.
Still… I’m tempted to do more. To indulge. I could extend the front cover to wrap to the back; I could make the opening quote page another full illustration; I could do a closing painting. I could add half-spreads, fine details.
I might have clicked 18,700 times by the time it’s all done.
2.5 - Interlude - No, I didn’t name the puppet.
In the last letter I sent you, I wrote about a lot about a puppet. I am pleased to say that while he is not done, he has crossed two thresholds of corporeality. First, his hand tricked my camera into thinking that a human person was waving for a selfie. I was supposed to shoot a test video. Instead…
Second: suddenly and all at once, people began asking me a new question. What is his name?
He does not have a name. Not yet.
My mother suggested I name him Kurt 2, “like your brother named his stuffed toy Devin 2. Do you remember the rabbit? He carried it everywhere!”
This was not a helpful naming suggestion, but it did give me context on what my mother thinks of my puppet situation.
I am sure the puppet will have a name sometime soon. If you want to know that name, consider subscribing?
That was a cruel, dangling promise, so I’ll move on and we’ll both pretend I didn’t try to bribe you with a puppet’s name like some kind of wicked gnome.
3 - How to dispose of a copy of Dance Dance Revolution Ultramix 2 (2004).
On my fourteenth birthday, my parents bought me a copy of Dance Dance Revolution Ultramix 2.
This was a deeply uncool possession used to its maximum potential. You might imagine that this is because, unlike the youth in the trailer above, I danced alone in the basement. That is true. But I also took it to sleepovers at a Christian youth group.
Earlier this year, I spirited away the miraculously-still-functional Xbox 360 that lingered in my parents’ basement. My wife wanted to play Fallout 3, exploring wastelands and shooting raiders. When asked later, I would tell people that my wife had also asked to bring Dance Dance Revolution Ultramix 2.
She has since disavowed me of that false memory. I am told that what actually happened was this: grinning with sin, I dashed out to the car holding a large, floppy dance mat.
I cannot identify with the man from April who thought he would have the desire to play Dance Dance Revolution: Ultramix 2. I cannot identify with the man who thought he would have room for Dance Dance Revolution: Ultramix 2. The mat sat in an undignified heap in the corner, large but ignored like an unmade bed.
Months later, I admitted defeat. I placed the mat in the middle of my floor. I took a picture. I posted it online, for free.
No one wanted it. It sat on the floor for two weeks. Only one member of my household was happy about this.
Finally, frustrated at the stupid ancient dance mat on my living room floor, I marched to the Xbox 360 to play it. To play it out of SPITE. If no one in the world wanted this mat, then it was my responsibility — nay, my destiny — to play it.
Reader, the cable didn’t even fit in the controller port. It was for the wrong console.
So I picked the mat up, brought it down to the storage locker and closed the door behind it.
Ownership is strange, isn’t it? We are the curators of so many things. Some are precious; many are not. But we see souls in objects, and imagine a life where they are loved. We can hold onto anything stubbornly, be it gift or gizmo or garbage.
And a funny thing happened when I came back from the storage locker.
The floor felt empty.
I did not dispose of Dance Dance Revolution Ultramix 2.
4 - Everyone in my Discord server is cooler than me.
When I sent out the first newsletter, I also quietly launched a small Discord server. This, as it turns out, was an excellent idea: everyone in my Discord server is cooler than me. I find myself in excellent company, with a very small group of artists and designers and craftspeople who are funny and smart and kind.
What follows are a few glimpses of what everyone is up to. If it’s all the same to you, I think this will be a regular feature. (These are shared with permission.)
That’s all I’ll share for now. Perhaps you would you like to join us? I would enjoy your company.
I’m grateful you read this letter, because I wrote it for you. Subscribe, stick around. Maybe next time I won’t write an entire novella.
Warmth,
Kurt
*This may yet prove to be a lie, depending on how my tabletop love letter to Mario Party goes during development.