Firesongs (Echo)

I got to try this game at GDC. Habitat: An Orbital Strategy Game.

After Earth fell to some kind of global catastrophe, humanity is struggling to survive on floating habitats built from space debris in orbit. It's a building game where you have to collect and cobble together space junk, attach engines, and attempt to supply your people with enough oxygen, electricity and food to survive.

It's a really unique game mechanic. It has a realistic zero-g physics simulator, so navigating around is a slightly tortuous process of firing an engine on one side of your capsule, starting to spin, firing the engine on the other side to counterbalance the spin, and carefully, through short bursts of power, controlling your navigation. You have to turn around backwards and fire the rockets in the opposite direction to stop. I like the feel of it. It moves at a slow enough pace that me and my bad reflexes, which clasically fail at most RTS games, can actually get somewhere.

I like as well the idea of scavenging and constructing a proper colony from the bits of planes, satellites, and apparently part of the head of the Statue of Liberty that humanity has left behind. (How the Statue of Liberty ended up in orbit, I have no idea...) There can be combat between one group of survivors and another, but it's completely optional, and rather than guns, it mainly involves propelling bits of debris at the other guys and trying to break their structures apart. There's an air of fragility about the junk creations that feels like a refreshing change from games where you blast the crap out of anything that moves, taking utterly unrealistic amounts of damage without slowing down.

Anyway the point of all this is that they have a Kickstarter here. They're ten days in, looking for $50k to bring the game out by next Christmas. They're developing for Mac and Linux as well as PC. Please support them if you're so inclined. I think this game could be really awesome.

Photoshop and MotionComputing tablet

Thanks to Photography On The Run for the reference material.

( Collecting sarfruit )

Photoshop and MotionComputing Tablet

( The Shashigai are the storytellers of Karn )

( When storytelling goes wrong )

The storyteller has the power to touch people's hearts, to capture them and hold them. The real test of his character comes with what he does with them afterwards.

Who do you allow to tell your story?

Photoshop and MotionComputing Tablet

I had to cheat a little bit on this one, because those are Earth symbols, not Karnese ones. I didn't want there to be too much of a cultural barrier to identifying with the imagery.

( About the nethik )

The Seven of Cups is about what dreams may come.

( The traditional Seven of Cups )

It's been a while!

I've been studying avian anatomy and flight patterns, with an eye towards griff, one of the four Karnese shapes.

( Images )

Pele's little sister was a badass healer. Her name was Hi'iaka. I'm reading a Hawai'ian myths and legends book we brought back from our trip. I just had to say that, because it's awesome.

Meanwhile, here is the latest tarot picture, and a story.


Photoshop and MotionComputing tablet


( Circa 2006... )

( Full image - possibly disturbing? )

This one is hard to write about because I think the meaning is so unique to each person, even more so than most of the cards. (Aeclectic.net's long writeup on their interpretation.)

For me it's about obsession. I see obsession as a need which can't be filled - and by need I mean something critical enough to a person's well-being that it festers instead of fading. There's a lot of personal history here, from when I was a teenager and I had my own obsession. It's tangled up with autistic sensory integration problems, the sudden increase in social expecations, and the usual teenage struggle with awakening sexuality and isolation.

It's personified in the crystal in the picture, which on Karn is a physical manifestation of that compressed and explosive energy. I've heard it called a knot in the fabric of reality, or a black hole. It's both alluring and destructive, and the restless ghosts that are drawn to it find themselves caught in an addictive cycle. They crave the energy they sense in it, and they seize any trickle of it that they can reach, but it leaves them empty. So they come back for more and more, forgetting anything else they might have cared about, that might have anchored them to reality. It's sexual in intensity, like a drug, giving a burst of power and then abandoning you to fall and crash.

And it's different for everyone, what siren song calls you, and how its false promise manifests in your life. It might be the promise of happiness if you buy enough things, the promise of love if your body looks the right way, the promise of safety if you do and say the right things. There are as many variations as there are people.

This is Yveth from the Water Song, the book project that shashigai and I are working on.

You wouldn't see her like this unless you were pretty deep in the speritu world. To normal people, there wouldn't be anything but a faint glowing silhouette. If that. Even a little light can drown it out. But shift into toren form... or if you are a sperith yourself... and the silhouette solidifies into an actual being.

This isn't literally what she looks like either. Speritu take on layers of illusion, and their forms shift and warp when they're seen from different angles, so you can never be quite sure what you're looking at. When I first saw her six years ago, I thought she was drow. That didn't make sense, because it wasn't D&D and the world didn't have drow. I kept trying to figure out what she was, and at one point tried to write her out of the story completely. It didn't work - the plot didn't make sense without a couple key things she did, and substituting in a different character didn't mesh properly either. So here she is again.

( The drawing )