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So this is a letter I wrote my friend SpindleyQ, who set up the Glorious Trainwrecks site that is at the core of my current game making efforts. Every once in a while I pester him with thoughts about my game-making delusions of grandeur...

Anyway, he mentioned the Poppenkast 10800 seconds open compo... that's 3 hours, one hour more than I used for manspider the other day, so I updated the game with sounds, wing animations, and a title screen.

Hey man

Thanks for pointing out the poppenkast compo. I actually was pimping GT a little too much, realized that's not a neighborly first post, so I retracted a bit.

Guess I'm back to my usual pondering the indie games community, such as it is!

I suppose it's like a lot of indy scenes, art or music or all that... always people around who seem more dedicated and/or talented but are still totally obscure, so you realize you gotta just take pleasure in what you do for its own sake...

There's so much volume out there! Like reading about TOJam, which I hadn't even heard of, but there's so much out there on a bigger scale than I usually play in -- people who work on teams, semi-serious music and art, tools that run at a different gear than Java Processing... (plus my age old fear that I'm missing the spirit of GT) Probably the biggest issue is that I don't do anything out side these little 2 and 3 hour boxes... and kind of lack the drive to, in some ways.

(See, some of us don't seem to be on the having offspring trail so we have to time to fret about these things -- probably a lot easier to be unka kirky than a bona fide daddy!)

Sigh. Am I actually looking to indy gaming for help with meaning and purpose in life? :->

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Game of the Moment
Speaking of games, I spent a number of hours on Fantastic Contraption last night, a great Flash based building puzzle game (kind of like sodaplay back in the day but with more of a goal-oriented structure) With FC, I like how part of the reward is seeing how other people solved it. It's humbling though... I probably wouldn't believe fancy walkers and catapults were possible within the system if other people weren't building them!

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Now that I keep track of my reading over the course of a year, sometimes I fear I'm reading to add to a score...

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Searle's Chinese Room thought experiment is making me angry! I want to argue with someone about it, it's so smug in its delusion!