LandSlide! Ready to go for thegamecrafter.com's contest for November.

I have placed an oldie but a goodie on TheGameCrafter.com.  This game was fleshed out back when I was in middle school.  Ben Johns and Dan Trombley, two friends of mine, beta tested this every morning with me from 5th grade on until we were driving cars and no longer needed stimulation for bus rides.

THe premise is to play all of your cards before everyone else.  The trick is that you can only play one card at a time lower than the card on the top of the pile, and if you play a card, it is not guaranteed that this card will stay there.  The next player may give those cards back to you, and then some.  If you are not careful, you might go from having just one card, to taking the whole pile.  It is a game of table talk, of trickery.  It's rules are simple, but from those rules, a complex and rich strategy experience emerges.  It is one of my favorites.  If you have anything to say about it, please send me an Email at RyanJRiojas@gmail.com

Se7enDIEse7 is ready in TheGameCrafter.com!

I have put the final gloss on the first Riverleaf Designs game on TheGameCrafter.com:
     -Changed the rules to be 4 cards instead of 5 cards to win
     -Updated a rule that would cause confusion
     -Added a scorecard and a box with a classy action shot on it (woo)

In the next few months I expect to get a Google Sites Site running where I will try to showcase the games I am developing.  One is a card game that I have been developing since I was in the 3rd grade...  Seriously.  LandSlide will be submitted for a contest to create a small Tuck Box game.  Until then, there is also Meteor 55, a few Hextile games that I was working on (They never could be made under budget for the contest, but I like the games, so I think those will be published as well.)  PsiMaTek Ops will be a long term project, and once I have a few things that I can give out for the Kickstarter, we can start making a legitimate project out of my cardgame.

Meteor 55

I am gearing up to start a Kickstarter for PsiMaTEK Ops.  It is simply a project with a scope bigger than I originally concieved.  I am happy to accept submissions for artwork for the game, but until I secure the funds to do so, my other option is to finish a game that is easier to manage and ultimately take the meager art assets I can derive on my own.  For pledge awards I have decided to obviously offer Psymatek Ops at a discount,  but I was at a loss for what on earth to do about the other tiers; What do I give to the 10 and under pledge crowd?  I will offer 7DieSe7 as a lower item, and a new game I was incorporating into the PON universe:  Meteor 55,  The birth of the Jaxon corporation. 
   
     The game revolves around an 18 areas that spawns Alien Monsters called spindels, bug like creatures that usually live in the ultra low pressure environment of space.  3 surviving members of a crashed space ship are fighting against radiation, wounds, and hoards of an alien hive.  All signs point to this rock being a part of a planet that held a queen, but now it hurls through space.  The radiation is avoidable,  the help becaon is charged, now the remaining crew members must survive the assult of a colony of aliens who see their presence as a threat to their queen.  At your disposal is the enhanced marksman of Z corp Space marines, the resourcefulness of Belt Mercenaries, and the raw killing force of the exterminator suits, colloquially called Burners.  Together, the players must stir up the queen and kill it in order to pacify the Spindel defenders and survive until help arrives.

New Game in the works, hopefully part of a series of Cyberpunk Dystopia games to be created on TheGameCrafter.com

In the future, the world is privately owned by corporations.  These corporations own resources, land, and technology and each person is born into debt under one of these governing corporations.  The global market and global government has dissolved and a sort of corporate feudalism reigns as the most prominent form of rule.  This new era was given the designation Post Orchestra de Neronibus,or PON. 

In order to protect the holdings of the corporations, they employ security companies which are now more mobile armies than security guards and system installers, protecting assets and keeping their indebted employees in line.  This is an age of relentless expansion across the world and beyond, where security companies can be rewarded for their audacity and cunning, and where a lower stock value might spell the end of the lives of all of your security agents, not just a bad bottom line. the year 200 PON, this is the story of one such security company, who endowed those in their employ with superhuman psychic powers.  
I have dropped a bit of pre-writing for a story I want to tell using games.  The first game in the series is a deck building game called PSiMaTEK Ops.  PsiMaTEK stands for Psionic Manipulation of the Temporal Electromagnetic and Kinetic.

Every player starts with a deck of resource cards.  They can use those cards to build a formidable deck of more resources and skills that allows the player to complete marks with custom dice depending on what skills are being used.  However, during the course of the game, the player also accumulates negative "trauma" effects that affect how successful a check against a mark is going to be.  The player with the most Evaluator favor (Eval) wins, and the other characters in the game get sent to the Vault.  It is a dark setting of Cyberpunk intrigue, global rebellion and war, and corporate and military espionage.  Think Ascension on Snow Crash and Blade Runner.  More about the specifics of the game in later posts, it's late guys.

PsiMatTEK Ops: The conversation with the Empty Girl

Conversation with the Empty Girl

            I was not old enough to see it; No one was.  From what the unincorporated old say, the burning of the world was an epic performance, complete with an orchestra of Neros playing at a grave pace, as their palaces were demolished along with their cities.

             The failure of those who ruled the former world was this: they assumed they had that which they did not have the rights to. With money that had no value, they hoarded ammo, weapons, vehicles, and politicians that they were not contractually authorized to use.  Once their power was revealed as a fake, their money hollow, and their authority imaginary, they also found the corporations to be legitimate, and formidable.  It was truly the corporations who were able to fend off the armored trucks and bullets, not with equal and opposite force, but with conscription and deactivation.  Not one shot was fired, because the bullets were not the government’s to begin with.  The armored trucks posing as law enforcement simply did not run, because the corporations owned the keys and gasoline anyway.  Instead, the firms that infiltrated those government settings simply ran their equipment without minding the power structure that struggled to exist, moved their special operatives with impunity and the security firms were born.  Thus the Cold Coupe ran its course and started the new era, from AD to PON…

---Jack Durden, official secretary for the corporation of archival works, wiki, server reclamation and intelligence gathering, a subsidiary of Waxer/Tori/Musashi Power.

            My name is… escaping me, how strange and unladylike.  Introductions are difficult then as I have nothing to be called, no moniker to trade in cordial politeness with yours.  I cannot tell you what I am known as but I can tell you what I remember about my life as a PsiMaTEK Ops. Candidate, which is what you wanted to know all along, I understand.  That will satisfy who I am as well as any name or title, but I do apologize for length in this case; a name would be shorter. 

I was born under the insurance and legal umbrella of Corporate Health and Representation, a subsidiary of the IHP.  Since my family could not cover the liability each month for having 3 children, I was given up for adoption and cultivation.  As it turns out, it was for the best, considering my infant aptitude for manipulating PSI.  I was inducted into the PSiMaTEK Operative program at age 5, where I excelled in telekinetic manipulation and basic temporal distortion. 

            Many people consider the methods of the IHP to be questionable, and I would have to agree to an extent; many tests and observations were extremely taxing and exhausting.  The reality was this securities firm was not creating soldiers like USA Corp., or espionage agents like ATOM, or even pain resistant enforcers with psychological trauma and torture like the Burton Securities, but whole armies self-contained within a single person.  Punishment for a whole platoon was required for a single man.  Pain was eminent to regulate a company of many.  The same was required for an army of one highly trained, highly talented person who wielded the “power of the Gods”, the very fabrics of the universe and reality, Matter, Energy, and Entropy. 

            I shall start from the beginning, and when I reach the end I shall stop, with points in the middle that are interesting and pertinent.  I am entirely not used to looking at time in such a linear fashion after all, but for the sake of my named listener, the one with no name will be polite.

My first memory was playing with a lab rabbit that I had named “Soft”.   Soft was exactly that, a fluffy mass of creature that seemed to be bigger than what it was.  When you held her, her real size was revealed to be quite skinny, but surrounded by fine fur that filled her out.  I was asked by the nice evaluator to pick up Soft without touching her.  I complied, unaware that this was impossible.  Instead of continuing to gnaw on the metal water straw, Soft floated out of the small cage door.  She levitated.  She hopped.  She did a flip and made me giggle.  I started to bounce her up and down, like she was now a super bunny with the power to leap and fly.  Of course as a child of 7 I was excited by the idea of a flying bunny, but that excitement turned into a lack of concentration.  I lost control of her when she was at the top of her biggest jump yet.  The poor bunny kicked and squirmed, the reaction of the creature’s adrenal glands prepping the fight or flight mechanisms in her biology.  Soft was scared, and if outside indicators were not enough proof of this, there was another avenue of observation I tapped into in that moment:  I felt the fear. 

Soft saw the height not as a fun flight of fantasy, but as a large fall that would kill her when it was over.  She was reacting to having her life taken from her and it resonated with me.  I could feel what her small rodent brain was projecting, no words, no plans, just this feeling I can only describe as molesting, a bad touch.  I was later to find out that as a PsiMaTEK Operative, emotional empathy was a constant source of mental scarring and in fact many people would avoid important jobs if any inclining of memories or trauma was showing symptoms.  Many had taken to even erasing memories via electroshock therapy, which made the trauma go away for the most part, but had its own consequences of constant practice.  Truly, the body could heal, but the mind wears its impediments until The Vault or the end.  I had not yet learned to struggle through the trauma and ignore it until the job was complete. I instead began to cry. 

In that moment I felt like I was watching the scene through the rabbit’s eyes as it saw the floor rush up to meet her.  My own internal voice was pleading with the bunny, the floor, the air, please do not smash me on the floor.  Then the floor stopped.  I had caught the bunny with telekinetic impulses, and the fear stopped broadcasting in the bunny’s brain.  

Of course, there was no other emotions being conjured in the rabbit’s brain either.  In my emotional state I had caught it too hard.  It had missed the floor, but it floated in midair like it hung on a noose, back legs kicking and body twitching.  I screamed her name and ran to her, but when I ran to her, an ideomotor response sympathetically moved the bunny. I was throwing Soft away from me. I almost laugh now at the fact that a potential vegetable was chasing a rabbit in an ironic twist, but as a 7 year old with a new pet, I spent most of my childhood mourning my actions that day with a disregard for levity.  I still remember the quiet, wet slap to the painted cinderblock that changed the color from institutional green, to a black and red smear.  I was simultaneously wanting to save the creature, and killing it.  The closer I came to it, the more I was destroying it.  Slap after slap against the wall, spatter after splatter running down the wall, it was all under my control, but I was out of control.  I finally screamed no, fell on my knees, and wept.  The release inside triggered a release outside and Soft’s body slid down the wall, no longer twitching, no longer flying, just adhering the wall and bleeding.  I could not see the other things I was in control of in those moments. I didn’t see the broken out the glass of the observation room, or the doors ripped from their hinges, or bent the bars of the cage Soft once lived in.  I was aware of nothing until the soft hand of the evaluator touched the middle of my back and, with a subtle whisper, told me “That was fine…  We will get you another bunny, OK?”

            My first memory is trauma.  This is the same as every other candidate that comes through the front doors and into the mezzanine of the PsiMaTEK training center. Everyone develops trauma here.  It is just a way of life:  trauma from the testing, trauma from the empathy of those marks we have contractually killed in the name of the Institute of Human Potential Unlimited, trauma from our personal failures which surely weighed on ourselves, but also incurred punishment on our fellow pod members.

            As we approached our candidacy in our group, we were exposed to a reminder.  I call it a revelation, a picture of what was ahead, and what we all were in for.  Before, I thought of my pod mates as friends, acquaintances, confidants.  I saw them for what they were: fuzzy hazes of independent obstacles, surrounding more solid intentions.  I saw a hazy façade where the solid self resided, a cloud around a particle.  They were all atoms, bunnies, planets.  Oh, perhaps an attempt to be less concrete and more topical is in order here. I apologize. 

            They brought out her blue eyes one evening.  We had all gathered in the mezzanine.  From the mezzanine, there was an entrance, the bunks, the lavatories, the cafeteria and in the most stared at and yet the most ignored space of the central area, the annex to The Vault.  I always found it odd that the necessities of life were being given out, joined by this vaulted halfway point to a strange and dark evil, the kind of evil that as kids one dares another to touch.  And yet, with food and shelter, there was also this:  The long hallway, the long walk, and the reason the colloquialism for forever was “until The Vault or the end”.   Walking toward us was a young lady, and in the lady, among other twisted and vile features were her blue eyes.

            The obvious reason why those eyes are still in my mind are simply that they were all a person could see beyond that leather mask.  The mask itself was more than a muzzle, equipped with psionic dampeners, a redundancy clasp only sprung with a twisted key device, and a latch and pole to provide the handlers with control over her head movements, standard items in which we as candidates were briefed and educated.  She was shackled at her ankles and wrapped up with a strait jacket, walking with all manner of pole and chain about her, small steps from the leg irons, all prepared to prevent non-compliance, and yet she walked with no struggle, no force, almost no volition of her own.  An entire body covered in canvas, leather, steel, and iron, all but her brilliant eyes.  Perhaps that is why I remember them but probably not.  The reality is that those eyes were not looking around, not peering erratically.  Out of her whole body, the only thing she had control over was her eyes, and those eyes peered at me.  They would not break their stare, no matter how anyone would stand, move, direct a normal person’s attention, she continued to stare at me.

            “Young candidates,” The one of the ajudicators started “This is one of the inmates of The Vault.  You all have been training to one day become PsiMaTEK Operatives, however only one of the pod will enter the operative stage.  The rest of you,” he paused for the drama, then reached into his pocket for his muzzle key “this is your future” 

            The key slipped in. turned, and the muzzle came off, revealing a head of greasy blond hair that fell over Blue Eyes’s face.  Her lips were scarred and her skin shone with oil.  A film of body filth, face sweat and split ends from years of confinement with no upkeep glowed against the light of the central area.  Her head hung from her neck in a somber, stoic manner, and then the smile cracked her dry lips, revealing a maw of filed teeth and infected gums.  Perhaps it is more appropriate to call them stubs and pits than teeth; years of grinding them down to pebbles no doubt.  Her chapped lips dripped a small amount of blood onto her gaping maw, and slowly held fast to her chin, as soon as I saw this, I no longer could see much of anything. 

            Annic, our electromagnetic specialist was the first to fall, holding her head and crawling into the fetal position.  Michael was next, bleeding from his nose and having his eyes roll back into his head.  Katherine fell over, crying and uttering something.  I could not hear her over the screaming, the loud unnatural screaming.  It was too high to be Michael, of course, and Annic was already passed out. Who was screaming?  I could not quite see the person making such an unholy noise.  I suddenly noticed the soreness of my throat and the shortness of breath; Was it my screaming?  It checked out when the blood from my hemorrhaging nose dripped down my throat and gurgled the scream I was listening to.  An all-out assault on our psyches rendered our team, my faithful pod-mates utterly useless.

            Bad touch.  That was all I was thinking.  Bad touch.  Bad touch?  Wait, who is asking the question?  I am not asking anything.  The voice in my head sounds different than that.  A flash of my bunny went across my mind.  Bad touch? Wait.  Blue Eyes… are you… poking around in my head?

            Bad Touch.   A flash of images burst into my conscious mind.  Flashes of my prior experiences and prior actions, a shot of the ground coming up to meet my face and a broken sound of a gasp, accompanied by a millisecond of flesh and fingernails.  You are in my head, aren’t you?  Touch is bad.  Get out of my head. 

            All at once, Soft was floating outside of the cage in my mind again.  That is MY thoughts, my memories. They are private and you have no right to play with them.  The gasp returned and I saw the skin of a naked shoulder and a hand on it.  No, stop.  Bad Touch?  Bad touch is not bad, but bad touch is connection.  Pain is the connection.

Blue Eyes’s mind was freely connected with my own consciousness now, shaking me around, twisting my brain around, playing with me, making me fly.  Bad Touch is the connection…  No, I cannot let her twist my mind around like that. I have to fight.  I had learned some basic techniques on how to strike a psionically enhanced person with my own Psi, which is what Blue Eyes obviously was doing to me, and I retaliated.  Fight?  You fight me?  Normally it is an ordeal to try to complete a psionic attack at the level we were at as cadets, but Blue Eyes had already opened a conduit, so striking back would be easier.  I forced a channel of Psi into her own consciousness.  You are weak.  You are weak and whole, and not open.  I will open you, open you to connection.  Connection.  Connie… Sheon.  It continued to echo in my mind, Connection.  She was echoing that thought in my mind.  She was obviously in control, but she was out of control.  She grinded her stubbs and tilted her gold and grime maned head and concentrated on me.  She began to look at my trauma, my bunnies, my thoughts about my pod members, my thoughts about the only male in my pod.  Stop it, those are mine?  Stop?  Stop the bad touch?   I channeled some Psi and attempted to belt her with a shot.  She did not flinch.  In an instant, I saw glimmers of Annic’s thoughts and consciousness.  She had already been trying to take pot shots on Blue Eyes.  Blue eyes was overpowering all of us in the room, too powerful to take down with the little bursts we were capable of.  Images of my life started to flash across again and I tried to shut out the proding.  The cacophony of words that were now floating in my mind were garbled between the constant refrain of Connie Sheon and Badad Touch.  My mind was being flooded with images, feelings, empathetic resonance and I could barely stay on my knees with the assult.  Then something curious happened. 

I had a memory that was not mine.  I stood naked in front of a mirror with a kitchen knife and proceded to cut into my own face.  The door opened and a man in uniform came in, grabbed my naked shoulder and drug me out of the bathroom, blood dripping from my cheek.  I was kicking and squirming and trying to break free.  I saw my arms covered and gashes and cuts and scabs.  My heels squeaked over the mezzanine floor as I was escorted back to my courters, strapped down and given seditives.  Bad Touch?  I began to see field tests, attempts to crush tanks with matter manipulation and receiving bad marks from adjudicators, the scorn of pod mates I did not know but that knew me.  Connie Sheon.  Is her name Connie?  No, but now it is!  I saw the day they muzzled her had put her in The Vault.  Future she said into my mind.  No, not mine.

I forced myself to open my eyes.  As things came into focus, blood from my nose, ears and eyes pooled in a rabbit shape in my immediate field of view.  Bad Touch?  Oh yes Blue Eyes, it is coming.  I picked up my eyes and looked at my assailant standing on the other side of the room.  I took my hand and held it toward her and closed a fist.  Her greasy hair tightened in a bunch behind her head.  My closed hand shook a bit as a test to see if I indeed had her hair with telekinesis or not, and the violent shake of her head showed me the indicator I was hoping for.  The voices in my head became louder as I struggled against the agonizing mental assault.  The feelings from when Soft lost her life were being brought up in my mind and I tried to choke them down.  No, Those are mine.  No, Connection.  Connection.  Connie SHEON.  Connie SHEHAN. 

I tightened my telekinetic grip on her hair and started to pull up as hard as I could.  This jerked her head back as though she was getting a noose wrapped about her throat.  Memories of my rabbit flashed in my mind again, this time the splatter against the wall.  Bad touch?  I thought to myself, and by extension to Blue Eyes 3 simple words.  This ends now.  She made eye contact with me one last time.  I gritted my teeth and pulled my hand across my body, which drug her body across the floor in the same direction.  I then threw my hand to the outside, and the Ideomotor Response did the rest. 

Her scalp ripped off.  Her scalp ripped off and her body slipped across the floor in a bloody mess.  Her scalp ripped off and her hair fluffed off, leaving behind a skinny thing underneath.  The voices stopped at that point, and I was in control.  I was in control, but I was out of control.  I gritted my teeth and concentrated on moving her body.  I lifted her body off the ground and slammed her head against the ground.  My hand dropped;  the body dropped.  My hand dropped again, and her body dropped again.  Over and over I slammed her head into the tile floor.  I slammed it until when I picked up her face I could not recognize it as a face.  I slammed it until it was nothing more than blood and bone.  I slammed it until those blue eyes were little more than sockets and jelly.  I slammed it until I was distracted by crying from some other place.  Was she still alive?  The exposed skull should have been enough of an indicator that she was dead, and the crying was not in my head.  Now I was once again disconnected from my own awareness, and I once again realized that the sound I was hearing was in fact my own crying.  I gave the body a toss into the wall and let my arms fall to the ground, laying by body prostrate on the bloody tile floor. 

            I would be later be congratulated for my actions, completing a mark for my pod and gaining favor from my evaluators.  I walked away from this with a new resolve to get to the end, to become a PSiMaTEK Operative, and not become a twisted vault creature.  I now had no classmates, no pod members, no friends, no people, only objects in my way, objects requiring to be moved.  I was alone in this lonely universe, a lone nucleus among a cloud of distracting sparks. 

            So we have covered the first name, now we cover the middle name with the gory details, and now we cover my surname, the part that ultimately defines where I have been with the program. Let me tell you where I met Connie.

            I knew it was over when they came into the bathroom during one of my morning “constitutionals.”  I had been dealing with so much at the molecular level you see, and it was hard to deal with the truth many days.  An atom is nothing more than a solid ball with a cloud of sparks.  The universe is in fact mostly empty.  It is sparsely littered with molecules, protons, neutrons, electrons, photons and radiation.  For the most part, reality is empty, with a bit of something floating in it.  I can move a single molecule into a position with no effort, pinch the windpipe of a dignitary, crush a tank with a thought, and throw a car through the air just by wanting to.  I don’t even need my hands anymore, totally in control, and yet totally out of control.  What does it matter?  Matter, I mean.  Car, prisoner, rodent, it is all emptiness peppered with stuff, no individuality, no difference. 

To cope, I would spend my mornings watching red lines create themselves in the porcelain basin of the lavatory sink.  I watched nothing constitute the cracks between shards of reflective surface, skewing my face into a broken version of me, with my eyes in the wrong part of my forehead, my mouth unevenly sitting above and below my chin, and my teeth, slightly grinding, making two halves of the same smile.  The mirror was intact, save for only one forked shard that was digging into the palm of my hand.  In those moments I knew why Blue Eyes would cut herself.  It was not for attention, or for the feeling, or to deface herself.  It was to assert an impossibility, to fight what we both knew as truth, that in all probability, because the universe is mostly empty, the chances of things colliding with other things is impossible, and yet, the soft flesh of my hand, arms, shoulders, hips and legs always seemed to stop the sharp objects; collision was achieved, and it reaffirmed my existence and sentience.  I was already on watch for sharp items, so I had to improvise with the glass from the mirror.  The crash tipped off the security and I was escorted out, given tranquilizers and woke up to hear that Mike was going off to become the graduating operative.  Good for him too.  Katherine failed a lot of marks, so they could not trust her performance, even though she did pull down a spy satellite, which was impressive, but not impressive enough.  Annic was a lost cause, of course.  She would use her electromagnetic acclimation to burn away bad memories, until that fateful day in June when she had lobotomized herself by overcooking her brain.  She thinks she is 5 years old and likes milkshakes some days, and others, she regains her age but forgets how to make a spark, totally unreliable.  It was between Mike and me, and apparently self-mutilation, for whatever reason, is not seen as a positive.  I guess it is an ironic condition for me, like a carrot chasing a rabbit.  I spend a good part of my day on tranquilizers to keep me from crushing the orderlies throats.  The muzzle went over my face and I was escorted down the long annex.  Kids were watching me like I was some sort of boogey man.  They marched me into the room and locked the gate behind me. 

Supposedly, no one has ever escaped The Vault, but rumors of a Connie Shehan seems to circulate in here, a woman who escaped, or who was free to roam around the vault, torturing the inmates there, Satan herself. I used to consider escape, but now I sit and wait for my turn to die at the hand of the IHP.  I am too powerful after the training to be allowed out anywhere, and yet with all that control, I have none.  The muzzle is uncomfortable.  I could remove it of course.  No really I could.  It takes my pinky finger twisting and breaking, but I could get rid of it.  It is not worth it really, or at least I thought it wasn’t.

She came to me.  I don’t know how but she did.  I was hearing voices in my head, which is normal, but it was not my own voice.  It was smaller, mousey, slightly snarky, definitely not my voice.

“Sweetie, let me help you out of this vest.”

I said nothing.  I was used to this sort of thing.  Always voices speaking to me, always something in my psionically dampened mind.

“Enough with this imaginary audience interviewing you.  Let me help you out of the vest” I could feel my arm start to move and twist.  I looked around in the dark.  There was a figure I could not quite make out standing in front of me, holding my chin, wait was she pulling my arm or holding my chin up?  It’s hard to tell. 

“I can’t unbuckle the straps so, I am sorry in advance, but I am going to have to break it.”

I thought What?

“Break your shoulder.  Then I can pull your arm over and work on that nasty little face cage.  I felt tension in my arm as it started to move beyond what it was intended to.  A pop and a twist ended the pressure and replaced the sensation with pain.  Again, I heard screaming, disjunct screaming from my own mouth, gaged behind a leather mask.  “See I tried this with Blue Eyes and she couldn’t really pull it off.  That is why she only carried the connection out to you and let her die.  It was her time of course.”

The arm flopped at my side, no longer tied behind my back, but no longer able to move on its own power.  The girl snickered at me and grabbed my hand, placing it at the key to the muzzle. 

“now, I can’t very well have you working for me without being able to use your powers, now can I.”  Was she still holding my chin? Caressing my muzzled face?  Or was she putting my finger in the lock, the lock I knew would trade my finger for a free face.  “Sweetie, I need you to work this trigger.”  My hand was forced into the hole and I could hear it crack and pop.  My arm twisted and I jabbed the tumbler behind my head, dropping the muzzle to the floor. 

I kneeled in my pain.  Crying and reaching my broken hand over to touch the dislocated shoulder. 

“Shut up Sweetie.  I will fix it”

My body floated in the dark and both my shoulder and finger set.  I screamed and fell to the ground.  A hand went through my hair in a comforting movement. 

“There there sweetie.  It’s over now.”

“Who are you?”  I asked, grasping for her hand.  There was nothing there, no hand, no girl.  The voice was gone and I remained in my small cell in this massive container, once again alone in the universe.  I was left to my own thoughts again.

The walls of the vault have two properties.  The first is that they have Psionic dampeners operating on its own personal generator.  The other properties is simple, it is matter, just like everything else in this world, and though I have no freedom, right now, I am in control, but out of control.  It is only a matter of time.  If Connie Shehan made it out, I could do it too.  The IHP had made a monster like me, and I will be damned if this monster will remain under this bed, in the shadows, scaring small children.  I want out, and I will make it out. 

I am all talk of course, just a scared bunny waiting to die against the wall.  But perhaps, just perhaps I can fly.  Perhaps I can fly myself out of here.

“That is why I freed you Sweetie, now get us out of here.”

The wall is only dots and clouds after all.

Se7enDIESe7 is now published on TheGamecrafter.com

My first project is finally available for purchase.  I would like to get as much feedback as possible about the game.  It is my first attempt to utilize the TGC interface and supplies.  Sure, there is no fantasy plot, no orcs or real estate tycoons or anything like that.  It is just a basic game, good to kill the 15 minutes you would have to spend talking to someone.  The rules fit on 2 playing cards and the whole thing fits into your (cargo) pocket.

What I hope to demonstrate:
     Competency in game design:  That I can make cohesive and engrossing mechanics that are cleverly conceived and well described and illustrated.

    The usefulness of TGC!:  I was so happy when I found TheGameCrafter.com  I have wanted to do something like this since I was 5 years old (those of you who might remember Knock it off!) and now I have made my first little step to becoming a game designer with the help of the resources, templates, and interface of TGC.  Thanks guys.

     The wanderings of a restless mind can be put to use:  enough said.

Anyway I hope everybody can check out my game.  maybe drop a few bucks on it and have a good time.  Seriously, what else will you be doing waiting for the Chinese food to get to your door?

Se7enDieSe7

I was exposed to the game mechanics at a camp when I was very young.  The idea was to roll die to score points.  The more die you were scoring, the less the amount of die you were rolling, so the more points you wanted, the more risky the roll.  I liked the tension the game made and wondered if it were possible to offer someone something more than 7 die in a bag.  The solution was simple:  add another die!...  and maybe a scoring mechanic to lead to an end.  the end result is this wonderful risk management, Luck pushing mess of cheap cards and cheap thrills.  I'll have more on the particulars if people ask for them.  Otherwise the rules fit on two playing cards, very simple, very fun.  Fell free to try it :^}

-Ryan

So, I have resurrected the ol' blog to have a place to link to when creating miscellaneous online sundries and projects.  We'll see if we need to copyright any of this stuff :^}  anywho, this is where I will be posting T-Shirt designs for Cafe Press, Development notes for my games on The Game Crafters site, and other ideas that I can produce via indie sources. 

Hopefully more to follow

-RJR