Our cooking show now has an IndieGoGo campaign. We’d be very grateful if you could spread the word, or even contribute. The first episode we produced went over really well, but we need a tiny bit of funding to be able to afford a website and repair some things in our kitchen; if that works out, you can look forward to regular episodes of the Starving Artists Kitchen Show. Yes indeed! So let the world know about this campaign.

Leftover from 2011:

• Traitor. My casual shoot ‘em up with RPG elements and a strange setting. It’s been done for a while, but I’ve been polishing and improving it. Hoping it will find a decent sponsorship soon.
• Catroidvania: Communist Space Cats of Venus. I was almost done with this game before a series of events derailed me a bit, but I’m going to go back and clean it up, make it more streamlined and straightforward. This will also be up for sponsorship.
• Untitled Twine Game. A text game made with Twine. Not revealing details yet. Not a huge project, but I’m really fond of it.

2012 projects:

• Our children’s book (in Greek), currently titled In the Shadow of the Invisible King. I need to send the publisher my finished draft, but I honestly think this book is going to be awesome. Verena’s illustrations are stunning. If it does well in Greece, we might be able to get out an English edition.
• Nexus City. The insane RPG I’m making with Terry Cavanagh. A big project, but one that you won’t regret having waited for.
• The Nexus City prequel. A smaller game introducing the world and some of the characters. Not really a prequel, actually, but more of a standalone story. Great fun and featuring a protagonist I’m really looking forward to sharing with the world.
• Untitled Lands of Dream game. A commercial (not very expensive) Lands of Dream game, similar in some ways to The Strange and Somewhat Sinister Tale of the House at Desert Bridge. To be released somewhere around late March. I’ll be posting more information about it soon.
• Ithaka of the Clouds (previously referred to as the Troll Game). The other big project of the year, this will be an enormous game set in the Lands of Dream. The graphics alone will take Verena many more months to complete. It’s an adventure and a love story and I’m greatly looking forward to it.
• The Starving Artist Cooking Show. Yes, this is definitely happening. People really seemed to like the first episode, so we’re putting up an IndieGoGo campaign to help us finance a website for it. If that works out, episodes will appear on a regular basis.
• Commentarium. Our film site died an ignoble death last year due to issues with the server, but it’s going to make a comeback this year. Possibly with video reviews. We have to do this, if only to be able to share all the film-related thoughts clogging up our minds.

Potential Projects:

• A Candle in the Dark. I was hugely looking forward to this project, but then I found out Multimedia Fusion couldn’t really do Flash platformers (or rather it could, but there were inexplicable slowdowns on many systems). It’s still going to happen in some form, but that might depend on our financial situation.
• Rise Like Lions. I rarely have good ideas for game mechanics, being more of a story/content kind of guy, but this one is too good to pass up. The form it will ultimately take will depend on how other projects go. Besides, it forms a sort of thematic trilogy with Traitor and Catroidvania, so I’m definitely not abandoning it.
• Untitled Exploration Game. A new take on the original, unreleased version of Phenomenon 32. A game about exploring an alien world and learning to survive in it. As above, details will depend on finances.

These plans are ambitious, of course, and the list doesn’t even include some of the film projects I’d like to work on; hell, it doesn’t even include some of the game-related things I might do. Much of it will depend on how much money we’ve got available – we’re looking at every possibility right now, including grants (if you know something relevant in Germany, please let me know!). I’m becoming increasingly aware of needing to treat the business aspects of game development more seriously, but I think that I can get to a place where we turn the making of art into something we can survive doing. 2011 was a struggle at times, but we’re not willing to surrender.

Your support in all of this will become increasingly important, and I’m not just talking about donations (though the Oneiropolis Compendium will keep going, because I love it). Our biggest problem with The Book of Living Magic was getting the word out, and it’ll be the same with many of these projects. There’s an audience out there for what we do, but we’re not going to reach it without word of mouth. We’ll need you to write to your favourite sites, to vote stuff up on StumbleUpon, to spread the word on Twitter and Facebook. Games are nothing without players, after all.

That’s it for now. A lot more might come up; if we can get some kind of funding, all sorts of other possibilities will open up. Either way, it’ll be an interesting year.

I feel like the year was a failure; that feeling is surprisingly strong. It’s probably not entire accurate, however. Looking back, I do see that there was some interesting stuff:

• I made You Shall Know The Truth. It didn’t get as much attention as I would’ve liked, but I think it’s pretty good. I wish I hadn’t spent so much time working only on this one game, though, since that started us on a downward financial slide that was hard to stop.
• I made Alphaland (with Terry’s help). The game was quite successful, especially if you keep in mind that it’s a game about a small blue rectangle. Unfortunately this was the point where I realized that the limitations of Multimedia Fusion when it comes to making Flash games were more severe than I’d realized. That’s why several of my more interesting projects – Rise Like Lions and A Candle in the Dark – had to be postponed.
• Alphaland was later featured at Spielsalon, in one of the oldest museums in Europe. That was cool.
• I wrote a science fiction screenplay called Melinoe, of which I was very proud, and which got a very good response from Amazon Studios users, but which hasn’t even been nominated for anything on the site, let alone won. After getting so many positive comments and emails (more than most scripts on there), it was crushing not to even be given a chance.
• We made The Book of Living Magic. I still get a ton of mail about the game, so it’s obviously not a failure, but the near-impossibility of finding a sponsor was shocking. I did not see that coming, especially not after The Infinite Ocean did so well. The aggressively negative attitude of FlashGameLicense towards the game didn’t help its chances or my morale.
• I wrote a short story called Fuck Vampires. Not everyone liked it, but that doesn’t really matter. I know some people found it inspiring, and inspiration was what it was meant to provide. I’m perfectly content with it.
• Verena and I created a cooking show and produced the first episode. It seemed to go over well. Soon we’ll be putting up a small IndieGoGo campaign for it. (We don’t have the money for a website, and the show needs a website.)
• Two of my four articles for the Escapist were published in 2011: Second-Hand Elf and The Bolshevik in the Borderlands. They were fun to write (though the latter was also really hard) and the results were pleasing to me. I even got in touch with some very nice people because of them.
• I wrote a complete script for the as-yet untitled Nexus City Prequel. I can’t wait for the game to be finished and for people to get to know some of the characters in it.
• Verena and I created the Oneiropolis Compendium. I still haven’t managed to find a way of getting any attention for it, but I can certainly say it’s been popular with the regular readers of this site, and has kept us from starving.
• Verena published a novelette called Life Support. Sadly, due to the enormously long time we spent without an internet connection and because Verena had to spend ages making graphics for games and the Compendium, we haven’t managed to promote it enough. Still hoping to do that.
• On a less creative level, I very much enjoyed being interviewed for Matt Chat (1|2|3) and Electron Dance (1|2). Good questions make for good conversation.
• I did my best to maintain this blog and keep writing interesting entries/articles. I love the idea of this blog as not just a place to announce games or other projects, but as somewhere you can go to read interesting, thought-provoking or simply silly stuff about all manner of subjects. One of the better things I wrote this year was Every Night I Dream Of Home. Mostly because it’s just so painfully true.
• I learned how to use Stencyl, and almost finished two games: Catroidvania and Traitor. Let’s see how they do in 2012.
• Oh, and I wrote a children’s book that Verena illustrated, which will be published in Greece this year. Except I still need to revise the text and I have so little time. Argh…

That’s a pretty good list, isn’t it? Nevertheless, my memories of 2011 will not be pleasant ones. What I will remember most is that escalating sense of despair, the emotional highs of hopefulness followed by rapid plunges into disappointment, the poverty and the helplessness. The country I grew up in turned more and more into a fascist state openly ruled over by banks while my family, like most Greek families, found it harder and harder to survive the new policies of financial genocide. When I think of Greece, of how long and hard my parents worked to have even a semblance of dignity and safety, and how rapidly it’s all being taken away, my despair triples.

I’m not going to lie to you. I go into 2012 with a sense of trepidation. Not because of misunderstood facts about ancient Mesoamerican calendars, but because 2011 showed me just how little hard work really counts for – whether it’s my work or anyone else’s. Not that you can avoid it, but it doesn’t necessarily get you anywhere.

I also became very aware of how harmful stress is. I’ve been living in a pretty much constant state of anxiety for a long time now, and it’s showing. My work fell behind on several occasions because I got so sick. A massive insomnia problem isn’t helping, either. I know other people are worse off – one of my aunts died of cancer this year, and seeing a human being waste away like that shows you how fragile we are – but it has been a real problem.

Still. Trepidation or no trepidation, we’re not giving up. There are stories to tell and recipes to film. Let’s just hope that we find a bit of success this time around. Just enough to feel a little safer, to have a little breathing space. Then we can get started on the real work.

Every day caravans leave from the Edge of the World that take travellers to the Lands of Dream. The caravans are free, but there are other costs the traveller must consider; not least of all the cost of spending so much time away from the obligations of our world.

We have done our best to bring something of the Lands of Dream into your lives: by opening a window to the House at Desert Bridge, by setting down a tale of the Book of Living Magic – and even now we are preparing to tell you the troll’s tale known as Ithaca of the Clouds.

But now, unfortunately, the costs of travelling so often to the Lands of Dream have caught up with us, and we are in need of assistance. However, we do not wish to simply beg (again), and so we have concocted the following plan.

When we asked for donations for what was then simply the untitled Troll Game, we didn’t know it would turn into quite the massive project it has turned into, considerably delaying the donators’ pleasure at seeing themselves in the game. So we’d like to offer you something else, something more direct, in exchange for your support.

For each 10$ donation we receive, we will seek, examine and describe a creature, plant or location from/in the Lands of Dream. The images will be in the style of our upcoming children’s book – i.e. like The Book of Living Magic, but much smoother. The text… well, you know what the Lands of Dream are like.

For slightly bigger donations (25$), we will even frame the image and send it to you. Yes we will.

For those of you who have even more money at your disposal (50$), larger framed images are also an option (approximately A4-sized). They are quite lovely to have on one’s wall. International shipping costs are included, of course. (Same goes for the 25$ option.)

In all cases the image and text will also be posted here, and later perhaps on a separate website. Unless you want to donate anonymously, this will also include a link to your website and a thank-you. If your regular email and your PayPal email don’t match, make sure to let us know!

Think of it like this: you can help support two people who are doing everything they can to create unique and interesting stories in many artforms, and at the same time help create a compendium of the weird and wonderful creatures of the Lands of Dream.

[To see the results of your support, have a look at the Oneiropolis Compendium.]

The password on our contract: XXXX.

That’s right, folks, they blacked it out as personal information, like they did with our bank account and a few other things. The password we were supposed to enter wasn’t there. I bet Kafka got his internet connection from these people, too.

Eventually we managed to get through to the tech support hotline. Theoretically the verification process has begun and at some point we’re supposed to be able to access the internet. After several hours it still wasn’t working, though we can’t tell if this is due to the account not being verified or due to a lack of network coverage. If it’s the latter, nervous breakdowns may occur in the vicinity of my head.

I’m writing to you from my father-in-law’s computer, which is refusing to recognize my external hard drive, making it impossible to upload the images for our children’s book so our publisher can finally download them. And since the Stencyl 1.2 download still isn’t available separately, I can’t even update Traitor.

A couple of nights ago, after watching several episodes of Red Dwarf and Goodness Gracious Me, I dreamt I was on a spaceship, taking an exam about Hinduism. The second task was to write a definition of “avatar”.

Am I going insane? If not, should I be?

Not next week, as I had hoped.

Not in two weeks, as I had feared.

In December.

Yes, dear reader: the kind-hearted Deutsche Telekom has decided to hog the phone line and make it impossible for our new provider to, well, provide us with an internet connection. Until the 9th of December. Even though we’re perfectly happy to keep paying them and the new provider until then.

I make my living on the internet, so you can imagine what this means to me. And no, there’s no way around it. This is one of the typical methods the Telekom uses to terrorize its customers into not leaving. It’s shameless and it’s a fucking disaster for us. My new game (the working title is Traitor, and I hope I can keep it, though I have some alternatives) is going really well, and we really need the sponsorship money, but it’s not exactly going to be easy communicating with sponsors without a connection at home. And then there will have to be integration with the sponsor’s site, which will have to be tested, and all sorts of other things that can’t just be quickly done in an internet cafe.

We’re currently investigating the possibility of getting some kind of internet-on-a-stick prepaid shit thing, which will be expensive and slow and unreliable, but still better than nothing.

This really sucks. Especially now that I have a game which is somewhat more commercial (a shmup with slight RPG elements) and might help us get out of this crappy financial situation, and Catroidvania right after that…

The title of this post may be slightly overblown, but it really does feel awful to be unable to do one’s creative work because of the idiocy of the corporate bureaucracy that runs our lives.

Yesterday I was fine. I felt great physically, had just come up with a new game idea, everything was wonderful. This morning I got up and felt a small ache in my back. It’s probably nothing, I thought. Five minutes into our morning walk it hurt so much that we had to turn back. I can barely move without all the muscles in my back going nuts. I look like the Hunchback of Notre-Dame on a bad back day.

And then the turtle managed to climb out of the aquarium and fall to the floor. Behind the furniture.

The vet says he’s probably OK; the bottom of his shell is lightly damaged, but not broken, and there don’t appear to be any serious injuries. We’ll have to watch him and see how things develop. I don’t know how the hell he managed to climb out – he’s never managed before in all these years. I guess he wanted to go back to the bathtub, where he was while we were in Greece. (He really needs a new aquarium, but we can’t afford one at the moment, and if I put him in the aquarium with the Zathras, they’ll kill each other. Zathras does not like Zathras.)

In happier news, the new oil pastels for the children’s book arrived today. Yay!

Anyway. Gragh. Pain. Let’s see if I can get anything at all done today.

I hadn’t really realized just how much until we got to Greece and I spent a few days doing nothing. Well, not precisely nothing: getting back into shape by walking to the sea every day (40 minutes downhill), swimming (usually about an hour), walking back (50 minutes uphill). Enjoying the sun and the warmth and the food. Reading – I had missed reading so much. I read all four books of The Earthsea Quartet and both parts of The Sarantine Mosaic and it was such a joy to be immersed in words and stories again.

It was beautiful and extremely necessary.

I did do some work: the children’s book went from vague idea to detailed outline and then to quite-a-bit-has-been-written. I am extremely pleased with the results. I must admit I was quite scared of somehow not being able to get back into writing in Greek; my primary creative language has been English for a very long time now. But I managed to find a story and a style that I enjoy and that I would have enjoyed as a child.

Our trip to Athens was intense – we crammed an amazing amount of stuff into those very short three days. Highlights include meeting Mr. and Mrs. Gnome of Gnome’s Lair and a number of other really nice people, and spending nine hours walking around Athens seeing the sights. I never cease to be moved by the elegance and beauty of the remains of the ancient world, and outraged by the braindead fanaticism that destroyed it.

Ideas kept coming to me like mad. Games, stories, projects. I daydreamed of using RPG Maker, of the next book I’m going to write, of potential screenplays. I felt the burning desire to make things. I’d missed that.

Coming back to Germany was, as usual, a bit of a shock. We’ve sworn to keep up the energy, though, getting up early each morning, getting in some walking, and working better rather than more. Those things, I’ve discovered, are particularly important. If you spent all day in front of the computer, you’re going to get depressed and your body is going to start falling apart. You have to get out of the house, move, breathe. And if you’re your own boss, you need to tell yourself to stop working at some point, or the quality of your work is going to go down the drain – and remember that stress and tiredness accumulate.

A variety of smaller, non-game projects will start being released soon, I hope. Some of them are new ideas, others are old ones that were delayed by the silliness of everyday life. My main focus, of course, is going to be Catroidvania. I need to finish that soon, because we need to pay the bills. But other things are in the making, the first of which will be released next week.

I hope you’ve all been well, and that as the miserable winter months descend upon us, you will find things on this website that will lift your spirits.

Oh, and our cat’s coming home today. I can’t wait to see the little monster again.

The third and final part of the Matt Chat interview with me. Many thanks to Matt for giving me this opportunity to speak about my work, and even more thanks for managing not to make me look like the complete doofus that I am. In repayment I hope to someday make the kind of RPG Matt will really enjoy.

(The interesting article I promised you will be published tomorrow, since I posted the interview today.)