Developer's Notes - 2

I want to tell you a little bit about the projects I’m working on this week. There are two that are really exciting to me.

First, I want you to imagine a city. It’s a sprawling metropolis. Skyscrapers peer down onto a concrete jungle where thousands of people conduct business, fall in love, and commit crimes. Welcome to Freedom City. It’s the setting of a new podcast series I am creating called “Manic Mysteries.” We follow the adventures of two private detectives, Robert Stone and his partner Styx. Robert is styled after the hard-boiled detective novels of Dashiell Hammett. Think Sam Spade. Styx is a geek and treats most of life like a role-playing game. I swear he’s only slightly autobiographical. Freedom City has elements of steam punk. There’s 1950s machinery, cabs, and railcars with a dash of magic. There are werewolves, elementals, and demon-summoning accountants. Each episode features a new mystery.

My goal is write, record and publish six episodes this year. So far I have written two and I one more in the works. I’ve done some preliminary voice acting tests. Yes, I’m wrangling some friends into doing this for me. I’m also looking at good delivery tools. If nothing else, I hope to put it on the Team Sidequest website. I plan on releasing them for free. I enjoy writing, I make killer murder mysteries, and this is a creative outlet for me.

The second project is our first game: “Texas Zombie Massacre.” There are a lot of great and bad zombie games out there but most of them focus on survival. We decided to mix things up. Instead of survival, the goal is to rack up points, which are earned by the shooting zombies. It’s a card game with a touch of tower defense mechanics. You kill zombies with guns, tanks, and lawn mowers while knocking back moonshine in place of green herbs.

The game has been in the works for a while. We’re happy with the general mechanics so the goal now is to refine them and create the artwork. I am assisting Gothic Panda on this task. As with most of our creative projects, the game is filled with our strange sense of humor. There’s the gluten free zombie, Rob the zombie, and a Texas speedbump (AKA: a zombie armadillo) just to name a few of the cards.

Okay. I don’t want to give away too much at this point but I will leave you with a teaser from the first episode of Manic Mysteries.

STYX: So why are we here again?

ROBERT: Well, it might have something to do with the corpse.

STYX: That’s a dead guy?

ROBERT: He has a dagger protruding from his back.

STYX: I thought it might be a throw rug. You know. A new fad. Kind of like those sleeping kittens.

ROBERT: Who would use a fake, dead body as a living room decoration?

STYX: We’re in rich-side. Nobody really understands these people. You’ve heard the expression, “Those with too much money and time are likely to waste both.”

ROBERT: Too true, Styx, but I think presence of blood and police officers suggest that we have foul play on our hands.

Developers Notes - 1

It's 2018. It's a new year. It's a time for new things, right?

Well there are new things coming to my blog here. The biggest change is what I'm posting here and how often I'm posting. This is going to turn more into a journal of what we're doing that will be posted in weekly digests on Mondays (ideally). For more WIP pictures and slice of life randomness then find me on either Instagram or Facebook under the name GothicPandaArt. I will be sharing the writing for this with Ekoja (my husband). Most posts will be either one of us or the other, but some may be both.

On that note, onward to our first post in 2018...
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If you don't already know me, I am Gothic Panda and the artist behind most everything you see in Gothic Panda Studios. I currently work full time at a 911 emergency call center at night and attempt to homeschool my 4 kids by day, and sometimes everything works, but usually it's chaos. Right now, true to my normal style, I'm working on all the projects. This includes some games, lots of prints, some buttons, some bookmarks, lots of badges, some plushies... you get the idea. I tend to be slow finishing things because I have trouble keeping my attention on any one project for any length of time. I have so many ideas and things I want to work on and I'm not good at simply picking one project and finishing it...or even picking 10 projects and finishing them. It's not too bad, though, as long as I work on things consistently. That's going to be my personal goal/resolution/thing for this year. 

Anyways...(I wasn't going to post an intro like that, but since Ekoja did, I feel like I have to too. XD And, yeah, we totally did not coordinate writing this joint post very well.)

2018 has started out with a bang. We attended MAGFest in National Harbor, MD over the first weekend in January. I gave my first ever panel with Ekoja. It was good experience. Giving a panel was definitely way outside my comfort zone. It didn't help that Ekoja teaches public speaking is pretty good at it, so next to him I feel like I must have looked extra... inexperienced. However, everyone we spoke to said they liked it and said I did fine (although I still have my doubts). Anyways. If anyone reading this happened to have attended MAGFest, then it was the panel on Thursday afternoon on Relationships and Gaming on playing together with your significant other. Otherwise, Ekoja participated in a couple of other MAGES panels there on Saturday. I attended a lot of panels throughout the weekend. I played lots of games. I bought stuff, including 2 more sets of dice. Did I really need more? Yes, yes I did. This should never be a question. I got some adorable chibi stickers that are now adorning my computer. Overall, I had an amazing time, and I cannot wait for next year. Secretly, I hope to be waitlisted again for this convention. =P

MAGFest has definitely taken up a big part of our attention over the last 2 weeks, but there's nothing like a convention for a motivational boost to really start digging into things for the new year. More on some of our in progress projects will be coming next week. ^_^
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Hi. I go by the nickname “Ekoja” or “Eko” for short because it is such a long name. I’m married to Gothic Panda. This is my side of the blog. I teach for a living, love to write and I’m a fan of most things geeky. Lately, I’ve been working on scripts for a podcast mystery series. I’ll talk more about that some other time. The topic for today is our recent trip to the gaming convention, Magfest.

I was invited to speak at the convention about seven years ago by a former student and I’m a regular panelist in their MAGES group, which is a bunch of academic and professional speakers who talk about games from game design and study perspectives. This year I was part of three panels.

The first panel was with Gothic Panda called “Gaming Together: Do Couples that Play Together Stay Together?” It was an interesting discussion that boiled down to it can and there are ways to help it. The panel went well for a Thursday event, which are usually quite small. In fact, I would say there were more people at that panel than any of the others I gave and I received more comments and questions from it too. Overall, a successful presentation. I laughed. I cried. I didn’t stick my foot too far in my mouth, and Gothic Panda was still speaking to me afterwards. I consider that an incredible success. If you get to know me, I tend to speak before thinking a lot and it gets me in trouble.

The second panel was about the mechanics of love and the third involved encouraging kinder interactions from players. This was the feel-good year of panels. They were both fun and I enjoyed the conversations with the other panelists. We attended a few fun events too including one-man performance of “Empire Strikes Back” and some Tabletop gameplay.

Gothic Panda and I also listened to a number of panels on game design and running a successful Kickstarter. They were very motivating for us to really push forward on more of our creative projects. I really want to make stuff this year. This blog is just the first step. We’ve got some great projects in the works. Hope you enjoyed our first post. Talk to you later.