đ° News: I’m officially part of this year’s Zine Quest on Kickstarter! Next Friday, I’m launching a campaign for a new and very improved version of ALL-CARDS, a strategic storytelling game you play with trading cards you already own. I’ll be writing about my experience plussing up the game and running a Kickstarter throughout February. Here’s a first look, just for you, at the new cover by the incomparable Mike Reddy.
đȘ Want to support the campaign next week? There are many things you can do that I would super appreciate:
â Pledge! Get a copy for your shelf. Reward tiers start at $1.
â Share the Kickstarter Page! Write about it on your blog, website, or social media. Send me a link and I’ll share what you made. If you want to review ALL-CARDS in February, I’ll give you a free review PDF. (Reply to this email.)
â Invite me on your podcast! If you have a show that reaches tabletop gamers, trading card fans, or nerds in general, and our episode can air in February, let’s chat! (Reply to this email.)
đ„ł Want to get your name in the zine? The $50 tier gets you a “Supporter” credit and a print copy of the zine. Any subscriber who supported me directly via my site since last October, at any amount, will also get a credit in the zine. You can get your name in the game at any amount here until next Friday. Thanks for your support! đ
I was running out of time. There were only a few hours left in the day before I’d need to leave for the airport to pick up my out-of-town family for Christmas. Once Christmas started, I would enter a Joy Vortex where no creative projects get worked on. But there were tweaks and bug fixes I still wanted to make to the Hologram Ghost prototype before they showed up, because I was hoping to give them a demonstration. I thought they’d enjoy it, since it’s a Pepper’s Ghost version of me, and that I’d get good feedback observing them, since they’d never seen it before.
One bug was simply that the audio peaked in the video. At one point, I yell at the player, “I banish thee!” My ghost yell was so powerful and frightening, when I played the audio the tiny speakers in the prototype actually went silent. So I remixed the audio in DaVinci Resolve and badda boo-m, no more sound issues.
Another bug was in the design. In the video, I give two prompts to users: a “yes or no” prompt and a “true or false” prompt. A common issue I found when playtesting was that people responded to the second true or false prompt with “yes” or “no” out of instinct. I created a whole-ass database system to pick the next video. I thought it would be as simple as copy-pasting the values for “true or false” to the “yes or no” cells, so it wouldn’t matter if you said either. But this freaked out the game! The game effectively froze and I couldn’t figure out why. And I still don’t. So that’s my number one bug with a bullet the next time I look at the game.
Time ran out. No more Unity. I had to get the guest bed in the office ready for mom, then pick up her, my sister, and her new boyfriend at midnight at LAX. I love Christmas, but this was the one part of the holidays I truly dread. The traffic is always miserable at LAX, but during the holidays it’s a Krampus-level nightmare. The thought of merging into a pre-wreck of unrelenting honking cars is my late December stress dream of choice.
This isn’t important to the story, but for the record, we had a lovely Christmas! Pretty tree. Delicious desserts. Muppet Family Christmas. The whole magical megillah. I got this incredible daily Quest Calendar from Amanda, where every day I play a short section of a 365 part solo TTRPG. It’s like someone else rebooted Adventure Snack and I can enjoy their efforts.
On Boxing Day morning, my mom, Amanda, and I were waiting for Holly and Aaron to arrive at the house from their hotel. Amanda suggested I show mom my hologram ghost prototype. There were two problems. One is that the current version of hologram ghost didn’t have all the tweaks and bug fixes I wanted to make. It worked, it just wasn’t working as well as it could be. The bigger problem was that it was very bright in our house. We have lots of windows, which is generally awesome. But that’s not ideal for a Pepper’s Ghost, which looks way better in the dark. Amanda suggested I setup hologram ghost in the back bathroom, the only room in the house without a window. Brilliant.
So I carried this five inch wooden box with a glass dome on top of it to the bathroom. I also needed to unplug the desktop microphone from my computer, since the one I bought for the prototype was incompatible. I balanced the box on top of the toilet, so the short cords for the mini-PC power and the monitor would reach the bathroom outlet between the sink and the toilet. Next, I brought in my wireless keyboard and mouse, which I operated on the closed toilet seat. Once everything was setup in the tiny water closet, I turned on the mini-PC inside the box and was prompted for my password. I don’t know how I managed to forget my password, which I made very easy on purpose. I tried multiple variations on the password, swapping letters for numbers and swapping punctuation marks for different punctuation marks. I tried so many times, the fucking computer locked me out!
As Amanda and mom laughed together in the living room, I was crouching in the bathroom on my phone, grumbling in the dark, searching how to get around the timed lockout on Google. It turns out you just have to wait five minutes and try again, which I spent about 15 minutes looking up. I was able to reset the password, then open the game, but only as an administrator. Even after opening the game multiple times on this machine, Windows still wanted to stop me from running my own game for fear of viruses. “Windoooooows!,” I shouted in my head in a Fred Flintstone voice.
After what felt like forever, I invited mom to play with the hologram ghost. When she got to the bathroom, I immediately recognized another problem. If I left the box on the top of the toilet, and she stood above it, she wouldn’t get the effect of the Pepper’s Ghost. She would be looking down into the glass dome, where she’d see a tiny monitor hidden by the recessed top of the box behind a slanted layer of acrylic. I needed to lift the box up to mom’s height. However, the microphone also needed to be able to pick up the player’s audio. So in one hand, I had the box delicately balanced on my palm. If it fell over, the glass dome would crack and break everywhere. No pressure! In the other hand, I had my desktop microphone, held out to my mother like a reporter to an eye witness.
And the darn thing wouldn’t recognize her voice! I don’t know why. She’s a native English speaker, a stage actress, and voice over artist for radio commercials. You would think she’d have the ideal voice to be understood by a voice-to-text plugin. But for some reason, when my mom spoke the commands in the bathroom, the game wouldn’t do anything. It acted like she hadn’t said anything at all. So I begrudgingly took over and responded myself. I knew my voice would work and thank goodness it did. At least I was able to demonstrate the basic functionality. Watching her, I could tell mom was mesmerized by it. She told me it was very cool and instantly made the Haunted Mansion connection.
When Holly and Aaron arrived, they wanted to playtest the game, too. So I took them each into the tiny bathroom, one at a time. I precariously balanced the hologram ghost in one hand and the microphone in the other, in total darkness save for the light of the tiny screen. I felt like I was in a cut page from The Cat in the Hat. The program understood their voices much better, particularly Aaron’s. Is my Unity voice recognition plug-in agist and/or misogynist? (I’ve gone down quite the rabbit hole to be asking myself that question.) For the most part, the game worked pretty much as expected. The presentation of it all with the wooden box, glass dome, Pepper’s Ghost effect, and the ability to interact with it at all, impressed them both.
Playtesting a voice controlled ghost hologram was, dare I say, a nontraditional way to celebrate Christmas. It was a little awkward, a little frustrating, a little fun, and a little magical. If nothing else, I proved that the potential for the project is high. The next step for the project would require a lot more polish on every level. But at this point, I feel good about finally bringing my idea to life and sharing it with loved ones. That’s not the true meaning of Christmas, but I guess it’s not not the meaning of Christmas?
đ„ Next Week: I’ll send a video of the Hologram Ghost in action, debut the ALL-CARDS Kickstarter, and share the game I made with Gwen Katz for this year’s Public Domain Game Jam. So much stuuuuuuuff!
đČ Your Turn: Have you ever shared your art with your family and close friends? Did they react like you expected? Or did their response surprise you? Do the people closest to you respond differently to your art than strangers? I’d love to hear from you! Reply directly to this email or post a comment by hitting the orange button below.
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