I dusted off my Thornwatch game last night and ran it for a few friends including Mike Selinker. Mike is a professional game designer and I was really looking forward to hearing what he had to say about my game. I’d sort of stalled on the development for a few different reasons. The biggest one was I simply didn’t know what to do next. I've never done this before and so I don’t have a road map or anything. I got the game to a state where it is playable and people seem to like it. Each time I run it for a group I get some notes and make some tweaks but I didn't know what the next big step needed to be.

I never know what exactly to do with Twitter. I've started just using it for whatever, which is probably how most people use it. I don't know what my previous plan was; discourse? There are an assortment of non-me people who are capable of that. I can say a whole lot of nothing on there, very easily. When I try to do anything else with it, it's like trying to talk with a live mouse in my mouth.

We have invented a radical new expressive form: called the comic strip, it uses sequentially arranged, ostensibly humorous "panels" to simulate the passage of time. It leverages a compact structure. There is no reason to believe that such works will not come to define the age.

So the Tithe has come to an end. I think of it as Hanna’s origin story. This is just the beginning of her adventures as far as I am concerned. Thank you to everyone who has messaged me about the Tithe, the response has been overwhelming. There will be more Daughters of the Eyrewood in the future I promise.

Ten strips is probably the appropriate number for a project called The Tithe. It seems as though people enjoyed it, which I will gladly accept over the alternative. And it's not even done! I get to work on it forever. Knowing what I learned from this, I can shift gears over to the novels with no loss of momentum.

Just re-posting this since it didn't stay on the front page long.

I spent a lot of time working out the design of the beast from the Tithe. When I think about the “monsters” of the Eyrewood I have some very specific ideas for how they should look. For me the most important thing is that they look like they could be real animals. I like the idea of twisting and combining creatures rather than creating something from scratch. I put together this collection of images from my sketchbook.

The series wraps up on Friday - here's the exquisite foyer you can wait in until it does. There were a ton of different forest beasts that auditioned for the role before this one, and I think my recently returned associate is going to break them down for you.

I pitched them a set of pages that was largely about the drunken singing of sea shanties, mostly so I could write one, and there really wasn't a discussion - these things feature prominently in the game, apparently, so they were down. Then I tapped Katie Rice (of her own fame, but also of Strip Search fame) to handle art duties, and we were off to the races. I hope you enjoy it.

I mean, is that a crossover? I don't even know anymore. It's ceased entirely being three things and has become a kind of ecosystem, which… actually, that makes a lot of sense.

Tycho and I have a tendency to make our projects a bit ambiguous. We like to leave room for your imagination. Somehow forum user PedroAsani cut right through all our bullshit and nailed the world in just a few lines. It's too perfect not to post here:

The Tithe continues! We are on page seven today and I can tell you that in total this is a ten page project, meaning it will wrap up a week from today.

So that's the other one. I don't know how much people like the "after action report" aspect in the post, but I get excited about something like this I want to talk about it. When I see a new page of it, I have to pace around the office and breathe for a little while. I have to. So let's talk.

My wife and I have been playing Diablo 3 on the Xbox for the last few nights. We played a bit of the PC version together but both of us agree this is much better. Controlling your character with an analog stick rather than with pointing and clicking just feels better to me. It could be that I was a console gamer long before I ever had a PC but the couch just feels like the right place for Diablo 3. Kara and I are both playing new characters so while we’re covering some of the stuff we already played on the PC we’re at least experiencing it in a new way. If you never played it on the PC I highly recommend you give the console version a shot.

Here is the next one.

The Lookouts pin set that we had for sale at PAX Prime is now available in our store.