Still Busy -What a Surprise!
So I just finished the Atomic Robo page I started last night, and as soon as I post this, I’ll be starting work on the next page. Which I have to finish today if I’m going to have a prayer of finishing Robo 4.1 before Brian and I leave for Italy at the end of the month. I officially have 10 pages, and 9 1/2 work days to get them done in.
To be honest, those are much better odds than I usually have to deal with.
Some of the harsher blog readers would probably just tell me to suck it up and work over the next few weekends. To which I might reply, why don’t you drive over to my house so I can bash your head with a garden spade, because I already work every weekend. Just ask my consistently irritated wife. Even if I could cram some more hours in, next weekend is the Widget’s birthday and (god help me) we’re having a sleep-over. The weekend after that is the Boston ComiCon, and the day after that I’m on an airplane bound for a country whose banks accept cheese as collateral. Possibly ham and wine also.
On a totally random note, that sounds like my kinda country. How’s the health care?
To make my week just a little bit more fun, my car decided to die on Saturday morning. I was out doing all the running around that Dorinda normally does while I sit at home in my jammies working. But she’s volunteering with the Widget’s Brownie Troop this year, So there go her Saturdays for all the little OCD errand running that she loves so much. And there go my Saturdays as well I guess . . .
Anyway, for no reason that I can determine the old Honda just stops. I’m driving along, I come to a stop sign. I stop. Then I hit the gas. It goes about ten feet and then the power just smoothly drops until the engine stalls. The battery is fine, the alternator is fine, I can hear the fuel pump whirring away as the engine turns over but refuses to start.
Then it starts. I get a half mile down the road and same things. I stop at a light, everything is fine, the light turns green, I hit the gas, and twenty feet later I’m stalled by the side of the road.
When you drive an old car with 236,000 miles on it you expect a certain level of eccentricity from the old beastie. To date I’ve fixed everything that was wrong with it when I bought it and I keep up with regular maintenance. So at this point I decided it was time to call AAA. Thank god I finally got around to signing up for AAA last month!
Because today is a holiday I still have no idea what’s wrong with my car. I’m just sitting home alone with the Widget, wishing Southern NH had a bus or light rail system to speak of.
The icing on the cake is that I’m still sick from my visit to Valve software last week. We all are. Not that Valve made us sick. Though in my case it’s causing me the sort of anxiety that keeps a person up at night, thus weakening the immune system, and making one prone to becoming ill. That nice sort of low-level, lingering chest cold that you almost forget about until you walk up a hill or play too aggressively with your kid. Then it’s hack-city.
The final thing I want to touch upon is actually a lot of fun, thus breaking with the regular doom and gloom of my recent (including this one) blog posts. Atomic Robo the Role Playing Game is semi-officially in the works. It’s an idea we’ve been kicking around almost since day one when Brian asked me, “Hey, making money in comics is just way too easy! Is there a niche market that caters to an even smaller, more socially awkward, segment of the population that we could really challenge ourselves with?”
The answer was obvious; Our fellow RPG players. It’s an open secret that Atomic Robo the comic is little more than an excuse for Brian and me to portray the sort of crazy pulp science fiction RPG adventure that we’d rather be playing -With Brian as Atomic Robo, while I assume the role of whatever quirky secondary character happens to be upstaging him at that moment; be that Jenkins, Dr. Dinosaur, The Sparrow, etc.
Currently the RPG is in the embryonic stages of development. In fact, It’s a cluster of four identical self-replication cells. Whatever you call that stage of reproduction. But what we have agreed upon after rejecting the idea months ago, then hemming and hawing, then coming back to the original idea and realizing how brilliant it really was, is what game engine to use.
For those of you not interested in game design you are A.) dead to me, and B.) all done here. Skip to the random Splendor and we’ll see you next week. For the rest of you, we have decided to design the RPG using the Savage Worlds game mechanic (with some modification). You can check out a free version of their rules right here. There are actually several reasons for selecting the Savage Worlds system over the dozens of others available, or even using our own homegrown system.
But it occurs to me that that is an entire blog entry all unto itself. So next week I’ll explain why. For now any gamer geeks who may read this you can go and bask in the simple elegance of Savage Worlds.
RANDOM SPLENDOR
