The fleets are controlled by A.I., which are so sophisticated that they actually have emotions and sex drives, so the only way to keep them from going insane is to provide them with outlets for these urges.

The problem is, there’s been a glitch, and now the A.I.s are actually incapable of differentiating between the two, and all the ships are attacking each other, believing that they’re engaging in a little hide-the-salami.

So the players control hypersexual A.I.s who interpret every volley of photon bursts or tachyon missiles as an intimate encounter, lurid tryst, or torrid back-seat second-base tonsil-hockey.

Your fighters break off combat and try to flank someone else’s forces? Coitus interruptus. You fail to honor the alliance and you attack friendly forces? An affair with her best friend.

Also, I built this Death Star from scratch.

I also delivered a lecture about storytelling in video games. And narrative production. And heavily-armed rabbits. Here’s the Gamasutra write-up, courtesy of Lewis Pulsipher:

East Coast Game Conference 2012

Rafael Chandler is one of the best speakers I’ve heard at game conferences and conventions. While his talks about story in games usually illuminates the entire process of game production, this time in “Story Production for Games” he gave us a faux post-mortem of a game (“Full Metal Rabbits”) to directly illustrate how the story of a game could be ruined by production problems.

Ideas ought to be cut out as the game progresses from preproduction to completion, but in practice things are often added on, sometimes by the developers themselves and sometimes by people “above” such as publishers. This makes a mess. Someone has to be in charge of meetings and the focus of meetings (though not necessarily of final decisions).

Failure to prototype the sound early on using amateurs to provide voice acting leads to problems at the end when it’s too late to fix the professional actor version.

Minutiae often distract developers from what’s important. That’s because it’s easy to research and discuss something that’s not really important, rather than answer big questions about the core of the game.

Zany documentation can be a problem. Skip the entertainment in the docs, which are a blueprint. You don’t expect the blueprint to be amusing or entertaining. Concentrate on clarity and precision.

Creative direction is vital, there needs to be one vision not a different one for every person. There must be a sole vision of the game that is jealously defended.

There is a notion that voice actors are too expensive. It’s better to spend more (money and time) on voice actors, not less. Remember that under union rules you have 4 hours with an actor, don’t just use him or her for 35 minutes, record alternate dialogue and multiple ways of delivering the same dialogue.

The first draft is not the best! Drafts need revision, revision, revision. “Writing is revision”.

During questions Chandler pointed out that unfortunately in video games, much as in Hollywood, the writer may be the one least responsible for a game’s narrative. And where the choice is between gameplay and story then gameplay is more important.

Thanks to Lewis Pulsipher for the write-up (and the kind words about my lecture)!

This is a writeup of Brawl Jongg, a variant of Mall Jongg.

Mall Jongg is a new game I’m working on; it uses Mah Jongg tiles, and players create an interactive narrative (like many tabletop RPGs, except that you use Mah Jongg instead of dice).

The core game is about teenagers in the 1980s, trying to survive Slasher attacks in a shopping mall. But the game includes many variants, in which you play with the same mechanics, but in different settings.

In this variant, loser D-list superheroes try to save the city after all the major-league heroes have been killed off.

The super-team consisted of Mother, a woman who can give birth to anything; Refractor, who has special mirror/light abilities and talks in a very loud anime voice; and Phoenix, who has a plastic beak and can come back from the dead.

The game’s played with Mah Jongg tiles, and you have to play x-of-a-kind (two of a kind, three of a kind, whatever), depending on the difficulty level presented to you by the DM. If you can’t play, you can always score points by griefing the other players in various ways.

Interesting thing happened: in previous games, the characters played characters that were villainous, or suspicious of one another. But in this game, they were somewhat aspirational — a bunch of bush-league wannabes with something to prove.

As a result, there wasn’t much griefing at all. Instead, the players wound up helping each other out. They defeated the aliens and saved the city. But they took a lot of damage, and two of them died (one of them being the Phoenix, who came back shortly thereafter). Had they done more griefing and adversarial gameplay, instead of co-op, they could have avoided death. Clearly, the setting colored their gameplay choices…

Born in the volcanic heat of Mount Dragon, he wields the flame of Justice to scour the world of evildoers. His fiery temperament is only matched by the incendiary power of his Pyre Axe. He is –

Inferno, the Sulfurous Sentinel.

I was pretty happy with the way the axe turned out — not too detailed, because I wanted this to blend in with the other customs, and with the regular MOTU line. But a few dots of yellow to serve as basic highlights.

For Inferno, I used the following parts:
* Head: Two-Bad
* Body and armor: Skeletor
* Arms: Tung Lashor
* Weapon: He-Man

Honestly, I’m not sure about the eyes. They’re pretty ragged along the edges, and I feel like they’re missing something. But I don’t know what. Pupils, I suppose.

I picked up this model kit on eBay, being a huge fan of Godzilla and all things kaiju. Having absolutely no idea what I was doing, I resolved to assemble and paint the model.

This post is advice from a novice for other novices. Unique, I know; typically, you want to get advice from people who know what the hell they’re doing. C’est la guerre.

Ingredients:
1. A sharp thing. I used an X-Acto knife. Cautiously. No injuries were sustained.
2. Model airplane glue. Generic, purchased at craft store with a coupon. Cheap.
3. Goggles and mask. No joke. Fumes from glue and paint are only fun for teenagers.
4. Dropcloth. Didn’t feel like getting paint all over the carpet. Two bucks.
5. Model supplies: Cheap paintbrushes, standard acrylic paints (seventy cents a bottle), a few plastic cups.

After that, I followed the directions in the box. Not too hard. Leg here, arm there, glue together.

Tough part was after assembling and gluing: I had to lop off little bits of plastic and sand them down. Can’t have those sticking out, it’s gauche. But too much lopping and sanding, and you lose the texture (in this case, Godzilla’s lumpy hide). So be careful with that part.

Above: Godzinnia, phase 1. She’s got a slender face, compared to the traditional Godzilla look, so I decided to make her a female and paint her like a zinnia. I don’t think that’s sexist. But maybe it is. Is it? Now I’m worried. Am I overanalyzing this? Maybe if I use a Georgia O’Keeffe painting as a reference… Is that pretentious?

Anyhow, when it comes to making Godzilla a female, I was definitely not inspired by that execrable American movie. False kaiju! Shame! Between that travesty, King Kong, and Cloverfield, the US has utterly sullied the giant-monster genre. Just thinking about it makes me want to put on a rubber suit and stomp through a three-foot-tall model city made out of carboard.

Godzinnia, phase 2. Started with black primer, added purple, lavender, metallic violet, red, hot pink, and orange. By this, I mean that I spraypainted the model black, then started in with other dark colors, like maroon and purple. For the most part, I just brushed them on haphazardly, sometimes painting on top of wet layers, so that the colors would blend a bit. Then came the dry-brushing of lighter colors.

Dry-brushing is something you can learn about on YouTube from people who ramble interminably about the process, dragging out a quick explanation into 20 minutes of chatter.

You take the thing that you’ve painted dark. In this case, Godzilla, but it could also be a plastic model of a building, or a spaceship, or whatever.

You dip the brush in light-colored paint. You wipe most of the paint off the brush, until you can barely see any paint when you drag the brush across paper. That’s when you’re ready to dry-brush.

You vigorously sweep the brush across the thing you’re painting. The goal is to scrub the object until the miniscule bits of paint on your brush are picked up by protrusions and ridges.

If you’re painting a castle, you paint it black, then get some grey paint on your brush, and you dry-brush the castle until that grey paint adheres to the bricks — but it won’t get into those cracks between the bricks, so you’ve got this nice depth. Another layer of white paint, and those bricks (and their still-dark cracks and crevices) are looking more realistic.

Same principle with Godzinnia. Her hide is dark purple, but the lumps and bumps are dry-brushed metallic violet, red, hot pink, and orange. Gives some depth to her.

Above: Godzinnia in the tub.

I did a metallic-purple wash, followed by a glossy red wash, and then a pink wash.

A wash is when you put your model in a tub of some kind, and then pour a little watered-down paint over it.

Mix the paint with water — a small glob of paint in a small cup of water — then dip your brush in the paint and dab the brush to the places where you want the paint to stream in little colored rivulets. The watered-down paint’s going to stream right off your model into the tub, but a little bit will collect on the plastic of your model.

Repeat. Again and again. As the paint dries, the residual color will begin to show faintly. Again, this is to create depth, so that your model’s coloring isn’t flat. You don’t want to overdo it; it’s an accent, not a new coat of paint.

Picture a model tank, or halftrack; you’ve got it painted olive, but you want some rust. Actually paint that rust on there, and it’ll look unnatural. Mix the rust-colored paint with water, let it drip and dry, and there’s just enough of it to look accurate — an accumulation of residue in the crevices (I just can’t use that phrase often enough).

Acrylic sealer is something that I spray over my painted model when I’ve reached a good stopping point. It allows the existing coats to dry. Forms a nice shellac-type finish. Don’t inhale the fumes. For Cthulhu’s sake, wear a filtration mask. And a prophylactic of some kind.

Above: her spines were fun. Godzilla’s spines have changed color a few times over the years. I figured to offset her purple-violet-orange skin, I’d go with a mix of cream and yellow for her spines. Took several layers of dry-brushing to get it where I wanted it.

Wound up giving her yellow eyes with green irises and blotchy black pupils. The acrylic sealer makes her coat shine!

The city was originally light green, but I coated it with a base of glossy black, then started with detail work.

Dry-brushed the city dark grey, then light grey, then added brown and bronze highlights before another light grey brushing, followed by a layer of white. Tried to give it a demolished, ashy look. A city in ruins.

As you can see, the original green plastic is visible through this cracked wall. I need to get in there with a small brush and paint the interior of that building black.

Finished! Godzinnia stomps over the city.

“I screwed the suppressor onto my pistol as the Nosferodent scaled the castle wall. Hell of a way to kick off the North Carolina State Fair.”

When the analysts of Hex Division pick up chatter about an imminent attack from the Al-Hazred terrorist network, the team’s ranking operative is deployed: Agent Nick Tepes, a synthetic vampire specializing in counterterrorism operations.

However, a psychic on the team has already seen the future: Tepes won’t be able to stop the terrorists, and he’ll be killed during the attack. Now he’s got just eight hours to prevent this prophecy from coming true — but the psychics of Hex Division are never wrong.

Hexcommunicated: coming soon to Kindle, Nook, Kobo, and iPad. Print edition to be sold via Amazon and Lulu. Cover illustration by David “ShiverArt” Russell.

I’ve been playing Mah Jongg for years (I even did some copyediting for Jelte Rep’s The Great Mahjong Book). Always thought about doing a game with tiles. Now I’m doing it. Five-Crak!

The game also includes numerous variants, including Squall Jongg and Brawl Jongg. More on those later.

After his murder at the hands of the nefarious Asesino, Prince Juan Delgado was brought back to life through the mechanical genius of Aquatico. A living skeleton in a robotic body, the Prince is now known as –

Phantasma, the skeletal champion.

This one was a little tricky, because when you tap the battle armor in the middle of his chest, the spring inside flips a cylinder, and now the armor is “damaged” (and you then manually wind it back up to smooth-and-undamaged with your thumb). But i wanted his armor to be smooth and blank. Experimented with glue, but no dice — those springs are pretty strong, even 25+ years later.

I used the following components:
* Head and torso: Battle Armor Skeletor
* Arms and legs: Man-E-Faces
* Weapon: Clawful’s mace

Dry-brushing the face was interesting. My first effort, and I didn’t really know what the hell I was doing — I just knew that the flat white coat of paint didn’t have a lot of depth to it, so I brushed some pale blue on to give it a bit of shadow. The effect wasn’t too bad, I suppose.

The tiny dots of gold on his armor were a bit of work, as I don’t have steady hands. Got a bit of the Dr. Strange tremor going on. No brain surgery for me, by Dread Dormammu.

You know what I kind of miss? Skeletor’s voice. He was one snide son of a bitch, but I liked him. Same with Starscream. You put the two of them in a room together, I bet they’d get along like a house on fire.

Over the years, there have been various Masters of the Universe knockoffs. Some of them even licensed existing molds, which they used to create an entirely new line of figures with histories, names, and bios. For example, here’s a repainted Beast Man, dubbed Pantano, released under the Fuerza-T aegis:

Feeling somewhat inspired, I decided to create my own (fictional) line of knock-offs.

The process required the dismemberment of various existing figures, and the parts were then reassembled, glued, and repainted.

I bring you… LOS CONQUISTADORES DEL COSMOS!

I started with the following parts:
* Body: Merman
* Weapons: Sword and shield from Castle Grayskull
* Armor: Zodac

The first of his kind to walk dry land, he is the most powerful of the Sea People. He has invented several devices, including the BioHarness that allows him to breathe our air. Here to do battle with an ancient evil, he is –

Aquatico, the Amphibious Warrior.

Body: Merman
Weapons: Sword and shield from Castle Grayskull
Armor: Zodac

I used standard craft acrylics for the paint. After some experimentation, I decided that disassembling the figure (removing arms and legs) would make it easier to paint. Naturally, that cut down on mobility — the legs are locked in place with hot glue. The arms are still movable, though. So this is going to be a display toy, and not something that my son will be playing with anytime soon.