I realize that I haven’t been posting nearly as often as I’d like to — things have been quite busy on this end.
The big event was getting ICONS prepped for release, but as of today the PDF is available, and the book is at the printers for a mid-June delivery to game stores worldwide.
In addition to ICONS, I’ve been working on a backlog of releases for our MARS, THRILLING TALES and PATHFINDER lines. Lots of RPG work, especially for a guy who’s decided to transition to a wider focus on transmedia, but hey — the RPG stuff pays the bills, ya know?
In the realm of transmedia, I am doing work, but it’s all behind-the-scenes right now. I’ve decided to limit Adamant initially to development on two properties (which may be one project too many, realistically, but hey — I like to juggle a lot of stuff. Keeps me engaged), and development work on both is underway.
The first is one that should be familiar to long-time readers: my Western/Wuxia/Steampunk mash-up FAR WEST — by virtue of the fact that it began as an RPG project a couple of years ago, it’s further along than the other project, and I expect that I’ll be launching the official site this summer.
The other project, which I haven’t mentioned much outside of a brief comment in our artist solicitations about looking for an artist who can handle a mix of “Good Girl” and “Metal Hurlant/Incal” style artwork, is a far-flung space opera property which is called Vesper Nova. But that’s all I’m going to say about that for now. :)
The hard part about working in this new digital entertainment frontier is that every is changing so quickly — I mean, literally on a week to week basis. For example: Today, Adobe announced their Digital Publishing Platform, a new tool set for producing iPad-ready content which they’ll apparently be rolling out to CS5 users via Adobe Lab later this summer. They cite the new Wired magazine iPad app as something which was created with these tools. Incredible stuff, and absolutely in the venue of what I’m looking to do with both Far West and Vesper Nova. However, the tools aren’t quite there yet. They’re coming in a beta format, via Adobe Lab — and even then not until some nebulously-defined time “this summer.”
The problem here is that things like this are happening on a weekly basis — somebody announces a new tool, a new platform, a new program or outlet that can dramatically effect any plans you might have. You have to be able to roll with changes that are happening in dizzying succession. It’s very tempting to slow down, to put things on hold while waiting for things to settle out more — but that’s the thing: they aren’t settling — not for a long while. So you’ve got to fight off this sense of paralysis to avoid falling into a never-ending holding pattern.
It’s actually pretty exciting — the feeling of being there at the beginning, when the rules haven’t been codified, when anything goes….