Check-in at the No-Tell Motel starts now.
It's February!
The month of my birth. I took this past week off to celebrate and to get the No-Tell Motel crowdfund ready to go (more on that below). Most years I'm pretty grumpy about my birthday, but this year I just, I don't know, decided not to be. And that worked out. Amazing what you can do when you have no job eating your best hours and Good Brain backing your plays.
Anyway, here's what's going on.
On The Docket
The No-Tell Motel crowdfund pre-launch page is live, and you're the first people to see it. Check it out HERE. Art and layouts are in their final phases, and I'll share those soon.
The campaign launches February 23, but if you're interested, it would do me a lot of good if you went ahead and hit the Subscribe Now button to be notified on launch.
It looks like this. Today is a soft launch and I plan to post publicly about it next week, but you're free to share the bannerless.games/ntm link as much as you like.
Books! Merch! My shop is live! I sell physical copies of some of my games there, as well as random merch ideas as they come to me. That "Here For A Long Time, Not For A Good Time" Nosferatu sticker has proven pretty popular (just 20 left!), which is pleasing to see. I pretty much just make merch I personally want, so that extra dose of vindication is a strong drug.
For you noble newsletter subscribers, you can use the promo code NEWSLETTER to get 20% off any and every order forever. Check out the shop here.
SCAVS, the exploration mini-game for Blades in the Dark or other games, is in layout phase. NTM kind of took over my life, but I'll get back to this shortly, and you fair subscribers will get a promo code for a free download when it launches.
Art by Sarah Hamilton Saint of Blades is my official Next Big Thing. I plan to release a kind of prologue stand-alone adventure called Boss of All Bosses later this year, to be followed by a larger campaign framework called Box Office Poison, for which the above is a small preview of the cover art. More on this Soon(tm).
On My Mind
Chatting with game designer pals, we hit on what I ended up calling the George Lucas Horizon, or "Lucas Horizon" for short. The idea is probably intuitive, but even if you can't grok it, you're probably familiar with it.
Broadly, the Lucas Horizon is the point at which tinkering with a near-finished project turns from helpful to destructive. That line is different for everyone, and one of the obvious solutions ("hire an editor") is not financially reasonable for most of us. Clichés like "don't let perfect be the enemy of good" and "done is better than perfect" are true, but are so worn from use they're hard to map onto your specific circumstances.
I don't have an easy solution for you; I think the hard answer is you simply have to make enough stuff on a long enough timeline to internalize where your pickings-at shift from helpful to destructive.
Put it this way: if you feel doubt, ask yourself, "is this the move that puts CGI Hayden Christensen into Return of the Jedi?" If you fear the answer is yes, at a minimum, put that work away and do not think about it for at least a week. Two or more, if you can swing it.
For Your Consideration
Here's some stuff I'm into right now.
LESSONS FROM HELL: John Romero's Level Design Rules for Doom does what it says on the tin: maps Romero's level design principles from his book Doom Guy: Life in First Person onto dungeon construction. It's not 1:1, but the lessons drawn are still fun and inspiring.
The album from The Last Dinner Party finally dropped. This is one of those things where my wife told me about a couple of their singles, and then a few weeks later the entire world was telling me about them. Good stuff if you like dramatic theater-kid songs about sex. And I do!
Comic artist and pal Robert Wilson IV just launched his YouTube channel. His first video, on making your own comic, is filled with lots of good advice that applies to just about any creative endeavor.
I cannot get enough of these Sims 4 micro home stop motion builds. So cute! So cool!
That's it.
See you next time.
Where to find me:
All my games are on itch.io
They're also on DriveThruRPG if that's your thing
Physical copies are distributed by IPR
I also sell physical games and merch at my shop
Tune in to VOID 1680 AM Affiliate broadcasts
