It's hard to believe that the day is finally here. No, not the day that my first game ships, but the day that my website (and blog and forum) opens. www.windstormcreative.com/angel/ is now online. The site is hosted by Windstorm Creative, the parent company of my publisher (Immortal Day Publishing), and I got to work with their Art Director Buster Blue (love him and his name) on the design. Buster was the lead designer on the Mardi Gras 3000 Starter Deck (www.windstormcreative.com/immortal/25335.htm) and all but one of the boosters so I already knew I'd adore working with him.
With millions of MySpace sites popping up like magic mushrooms after a rain, it might seem a bit ludicrous for me to be sweating a homepage but this is really more symbolic to me. This is my new life now, as a game designer. This is where it all begins and I couldn't be surrounded with more passionate and gentle people.
It started with math, of course. Two women, drinking espresso with cinnamon at close to midnight, swapping stories of mathematical pratfalls and triumphs. That might sound dry if you've never sat across a table from Jennifer DiMarco. She could talk in binary code and you'd be riveted, you know the type?
So there was Jennifer, a fiery, dynamic, Italian thirty-something mom of two, published SF/F novelist, playwright, and poet. She's also the CEO/owner of Windstorm, an independent press, and a certified math whiz. People love or hate Jennifer. There's no Board of Directors at Windstorm. Jennifer calls the shots. And people in power are never universally adored. But here's the rub: She's always right. She's uncanny right. Spooky right. When independent presses are folding left and right, Windstorm will be celebrating seventeen years on September 14. How does that rock?
I was sitting across from her. A twenty-something, sometime mural painter, sometime theatre actor, all the time loving daughter to my globe-trotting parents. I have things in common with Jennifer--my best friend, author Cris DiMarco, is her partner of twelve years; we're both swing voters; we're both New Testament Christians (the type that would wear a tee that reads: What Would Jesus Do? He'd Kick Your Hypocritical Butt); we both love boxing, and we both love math.
That night, almost as an aside, Jennifer told me about an operating system for collectible card games. Not a game itself--as one might expect a SF/F author to come up with--but the OS, how the cards would interact and how games could be built on the system. Jennifer's system could be used for handheld games or board games, or a combination of the two. It was a clean and beautiful system with perfect charts all in her head but effortlessly translated to paper, complete with dozens of calculations. I was enthralled. Captivated.
If you don't love the purity of numbers, you may not understand, but to use a painting analogy, it was as though Jenn had handed me a blank canvas and a brush capable of instantly producing any color imaginable. After that night, I seriously couldn't eat, sleep or live my life without thinking about her system. I carried a "cheat sheet" of sorts in my jean's pocket, a basic description of the mechanics. I knew this was Big. That Big thing that I'd been waiting for without even knowing I was waiting. But what was I suppose to do with the system?
Then, I started having the dreams...
