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"If you're going through hell, keep going." - Winston Churchill

An Interactive Murder Mystery & Suspense Thriller

The Opimo, a $1 Trillion dollar mega-resort and casino in Las Vegas, is all set for its grand opening.  The result of a multinational investment fund, the grand opening will be celebrated by presidents, prime ministers, kings, queens, and other dignitaries.

This high profile debut of the most expensive real estate in the history of the world has not gone unnoticed by a sleeper terrorist cell embedded in southern Nevada.

You, one of the best agents in Her Majesty's Secret Intelligence Service, are assigned to the Prime Minister's security detail to keep him and all of the inhabitants of Las Vegas secure.

You know all about the plot to destroy The Opimo and everyone inside.

The Americans are authorizing you to use deadly force if need be.

Your own director has given you carte blanche to do whatever it takes.

The terrorists, not stupid, are expecting a pre-emptive strike.

Billy Bob Dean, the chief of police in Las Vegas, expects you to follow every order he gives you.

The day your party checks in to its own set of suites in The Opimo, dead bodies start showing up in parking garages, golf courses and swimming pools all over the 500 acres of Opimo land.

Bloody hell.  Now what do you do?

July 1, 2008

Delays, Dalliances and Dancing with the Devil

I'm finishing the alpha version on August 31st.  That'll give all of the play testers 60 days to help me find all the problems so I can smash them before we launch "Saints in Sin City" on October 31st.

I know, I know.  We announced a summer release.

You can't rush greatness.

The complexity of the characters and the intricate plot gives me no choice.

The permutations and possibilities of this spy thriller/murder mystery would give a geek a headache.

Yet you will be able to explore them all and decide for yourself.

A mundane exchange by the convention center may be pivotal or pointless to the plot.

A bagel and a coffee by the elevators could turn the tide against terrorism or be a terrific time waster.

A blackjack table could beguile you or bankrupt you in terms far outside the boundaries of 21

Subtleties and nuances such as these cannot be rushed.

June 4th, 2008

Devil May Care

An article appearing in today's edition of the UK's Telegraph about the latest James Bond epic "Devil May Care" really caught my eye.

Why?

Not just because I've been a James Bond fan since before puberty...

...but also because Mister Sebastian Faulks wrote the entire novel in six weeks!

The article went on to describe Mr. Ian Fleming's daily schedule of writing 1,000 words, then going snorkeling, have a cocktail followed by lunch on the terrace, then another go at diving followed up with another 1,000 words of writing with the end of the day bringing on a fresh round of martinis then dinner at his estate in Jamaica.

I said it before and I'll say it again... my cousins in the conventional fiction book world have it easy. 

Proper interactive fiction that tells a full story could never be written in six weeks.

Hell, I don't even know if I could pull off a stunt like that in even twice that time under the very best circumstances.

There's just too much going on -- character interplay, constant monitoring of the non-linear elements to make sure they mesh no matter what the reader does or when they do it, infinite checking of actual program code to make sure that nothing was missed and no obvious software bugs come and so on and so on and...

... let's not forget that the writing is the central hub of all of this activity.

If the writing is crap then every other element of a work of interactive fiction becomes irrelevant even if executed perfectly.

Like I said, we Implementors of Interactive Fiction write our fiction the hard way.

May 28th, 2008

Lights... Camera.... Action!

The game's shaping up nicely with the finishing touches to the story line in place with all the astonishing twists and turns I could come up with.

The boys over at 24 will want to take some notes on how to stun an audience with sophisticated, intricate and yet realistic plot twists that are completely unpredictable yet totally plausible.

Room count right now is at 40 totally done rooms and about 20 more in various stages of completion.  The characters are coming in to focus -- a hot Romanian babe at the high-stakes slots (you'll have a hard guessing her game!), a shifty Mossad agent, Commander Davis from Endgame (cover story: "On leave from USS Las Vegas to party IN Las Vegas..." Mind you -- I said that's the cover story...) among many other fascinating people from all walks of life.

I'm not completely cruel and heartless therefore readers can expect sensible hints scattered all over the place.  Any good intelligence operative will tell you  that it's very important to pay attention to everything around you.

As Freud said -- sometimes a cigar really is just a cigar... and sometimes it isn't.

I'll be heading out to Vegas in June, July and probably August to really get in the mood.  My powerfully (some say scarily) vivid imagination is having some difficulty implementing uber-posh surroundings from my perch at Starbucks or locked away in my studio.

I'll probably stay at The Palazzo in June, The Mirage in July and Mandalay Bay in August.

I need to get my mojo going.  And there's no better place for that than Sin City...

Besides, my Las Vegas Travel Guide is due for an update...

I've recruited the photographer for the cover art and the promo pics -- that would be Mr. Henri Sagalow.  His work is impressive.  Don't take my word for it -- go see for yourself: http://www.sagalow.com/index.html

I've lost 25 lbs in the past few weeks and I am aiming to lose 25 lbs more for the gratuitous glamour shots of the author.  I don't want the caption underneath my photo to read "Here's the fat bastard that wrote this fiction thriller..."

Apart from vanity, being at an ideal weight of 195-200lbs is good for me.  And my wife won't have much to complain about either. My muscles are totally not enjoying all the aches and pains, though.  I worked my arms so hard at the gym on Monday I found it challenging to steer my car properly the day after...

At least I'll look good and be able to lift any tree trunks that need tending to!

April 14th, 2008

A Minimalist Work of Fiction with Maximum Thrill

The long drive down to Atlantic City was smooth and uneventful. I spent the time listening to a sensational audio book and switched to music as I drew closer to the Borgata. I wanted to get "in mode".

Within seconds of entering the lobby my Implementor's eye got busy. Thirty foot ceilings in main casino/lobby area. Check. Twenty foot ceilings in all other areas including the retail space and restaurants. Interesting. Why the ten foot difference? Appealing to the psyche of the gambler?

That lovely fragrance.... I first smelled it at the Venetian and longed for it
ever since. I'd nearly forgotten the Borgata added that. Some company or other must manufacture the air treatment system. That's got to find its way into Saints in Sin City...

I raced up to my suite and booted up. Implementing all of this as well as an additional room based upon my own experiences at check in. I added a front desk/registration room. Initially, I wasn't going to do this.

I've been making an effort to build my interactive fiction worlds with a new sense of economy where overall gaming area (as dictated by room count) but the registration desk had to go in -- if only to give the reader a realistic sense of how the social classes sort themselves out in a posh casino setting.

You see? I really do listen to my readers and fans. Many of you have wondered why I made the gaming areas in my titles so large. Greystone is the best example of this.

With The First Mile and down to the latest Pentari titles, I've made it a point to make the gaming area just big enough.... big enough to give Infocom fans more of everything they crave thanks to what modern technology allows us today which was simply impossible back in the 1980s and 1990s. But not so big as to exhaust an adventurer who felt they must explore every inch of 200+ rooms to give them a fair chance of successfully completing the story.

On that front I am happy to announce that Saints in Sin City shouldn't be much larger than 100 rooms. This would make Sin City the smallest interactive fiction title I've ever put on sale in terms of gaming area.

There's a very good reason for this. There's just so much you can do in a casino environment. It would be ludicrous of me to Implement a 100,000 square foot casino with all the trimmings -- thousands of slot machines, hundreds of gaming tables, dozens of ATM machines, a small army of security guards and pit bosses, etc. etc. To do this would serve no purpose; this fiction thriller wouldn't benefit at all. Quite the opposite would happen if anything.

It would be unfair of me to Implement 200 rooms of almost pure scenery just so I could get the casino area properly Implemented to scale.

And let's say I implemented a fully-functional gaming area complete with games of blackjack, three card poker, Pai Gow, roulette, craps and slots... how far is too far out from the point of this murder mystery thriller?

If you want to play some games of chance you could go pick up Hoyle Casino for Windows or Hard Rock Cafe for the Mac and get a much better gambling experience.

Heck, Yahoo! Games hosts a dozen decent games of chance which you can play for free right in your web browser...

Walking all throughout the Borgata yesterday really helped me to get the gaming area in perspective. That leaves a lot more energy for the most interesting aspect of a casino; the people. Because the people always make the plots, don't they?

Oh yes, the people. Playing blackjack last night before dinner, I had the good fortune to play with a couple of Chassidic Jews for a few shoes. Before their seats could even get cold, a metrosexual Asian dude and his girlfriend landed in those still-warm seats.

Before I even got to sit down at the best blackjack table in the Borgata (criteria -- $15 minimum, letting me increase and decrease my bets comfortably coupled with a 50" flat screen with the last round of The Masters Tournament playing) my tour of the Borgata reminded me of just how diverse the crowds are at a casino. You have the old and the young, the infirm and the energetic, the obese and the skinny, the beautiful and the bland.

The young, hip crowd were at The B Bar and the Gypsy Bar knocking down $11 drinks ($9 for the alcohol, $2 for the ice cubes - no kidding!) while the older crowd lined up at the buffet line right before it opened.

How do I capture all of this in a single title? Have I raised the bar too high this time?

All of these people have a place. They all make their contributions to the experience.

In other news -- I devised a couple of new fiendish puzzles and I feel the "draft" phase of Implementation is approaching completion. A Labor Day launch seems very realistic at this point.

Quick side note -- I toured The Water Club (the forthcoming luxury resort connected to The Borgata) this morning as I planned the final convention space for Adventure Gaming Expo and came away with a single word...

Wow.

I've got a whole new set of sensory keys to work from now.  The Water Club is over the top.

Las Vegas look out.  Atlantic City is rising again.

10 April 2008

Field Research Begins.

This weekend I am heading to The Borgata on a multi-profile mission:

1) "Get in the mood" to write spy thriller fiction about a world-class casino by being in one.  I plan to park myself at a cafe or two on the Casino floor and make a sport of people-watching as I innocuously peck at my keyboard from time to time.

2) To scope out the convention space for Adventure Gaming Expo.

3) To play some serious blackjack.  I've been away from the tables for well over a year and, quite frankly, I've got the itch.

4) To partake of some seriously good food courtesy of Bobby Flay and Wolfgang Puck.

5) Crash in my suite and do some very serious Implementing with zero distractions.

6) Hit The Pump Room and the pools to just wind down from an insane first quarter of business as I recalibrate Malinche's operations with new efficiencies as I sip mineral water and soak in a steaming Jacuzzi.

Come to think of it, the entire trip could be summarized as a field research expedition where Saints in Sin City is concerned....

Next stop? Vegas, baby!

2 April 2008

Skin Care and Fire Safety Converge

What does a jar of skin cream have to do with a small fire?

This might be the most devilishly hard puzzle I ever created.

Yet, once solved, it makes perfect sense.

25 March 2008

Being James Bond.

I'm getting knee-deep in it and find myself hitting creative brick walls.  As I finish the layout for Opimo I'm torn between being a tourist, an architect, a security expert and a field operative.

Must I be all and neither all at once?  This is tricky.  Should I wear one hat at a time? All at once? The best two out of three?

But the operative is the one at work to make the impossible happen.  Doesn't that person deserve the most focus?

Yes, mostly. 

But not entirely....

One-at-a-time may be the way.

I need to design The Opimo practically and professionally as an architect would.

The architect would be designing a world-class casino with security in mind -- with the foremost experts on the subject of security close at hand through every step of the process.

Then I need to decorate the place in a way so as to stun 99% of the population without appearing gaudy or gauche as a master artisan might while subtlety disguising all the safety designs already in place.

(Have you ever seen the security and surveillance team of a casino at work?)

And after all that I need to scour the place and the people from the perspective of a world-class black ops operator looking at every instance of every angle for the hidden dangers that must be there....as a member of MI-6 must.

Here's one thing I know: I'm taking a compact approach to the gaming area.

This is both practical and realistic. 

21 March 2008

It's Showtime!

Teatro Opimo is just footsteps away from the Western Walk, the convention center and the up market shopping.

 Is it perhaps too convenient a location?

18 March 2008

Things are Heating Up

And not a moment too soon.  Creative as I am, it's hard to write about a warm, exotic place like Las Vegas from the frigid, drab environs of a wintery New Jersey.

Spring is around the corner and I'm feeling a little frisky.

Be afraid.  Yes, be very very afraid...

Remember -- an Implementor has infinite power in any interactive fiction world he creates.  Flights of fancy is the fuel of our fire.

I feel lit up enough to say that I'm shooting for a Labor Day Weekend release of Sin City.

10 February 2008

Shuffling the Deck

I've decided to approach Sin City with a development technique I've never tried before.

Usually, I write my interactive fiction titles from start to finish without stopping for air.  Whenever inspiration strikes me I'll just bang out a neat idea I have.  When it's time to add some new areas I'll map them out in my mind's eye as my fingers work the keys.  And still other times I'm not writing prose hardly at all; I'm writing program code.

That's what makes the job of an Implementor so much more difficult (and more satisfying) than that of an author.  I hold my cousins of conventional fiction books in high esteem but.... they're slackers as far as I'm concerned.

You see, I'm never just writing fiction or just writing text adventure game computer code; I'm doing both at the same time to one degree or another.

At the end of it all comes "The End".  The story's over or darned near over which means it's time to get the title ready for alpha testing.

That's when I'd normally run the first compile to see how many errors/bugs/etc. I'm hit with.  Then begins the maddening task of slogging through hundreds upon hundreds of bugs/errors/warnings/etc. before I can get to a story file that somebody can actually take a shot at.

After months and years of writing it usually takes one whole solid day to get a new interactive fiction title to successfully compile.  That's ten or twelve hours of brutal, non-stop coding which just a short break for a sandwich or a can of Red Bull.

At the end of the day I feel great! The story compiles! Have I reached the top of the mounain?

Not even close. I'm only approaching the finish line at that point.

But not this time.

This time, for the very first time,  I'm compiling as I go.  At the end of each round at the keyboard I am ending up with a finished, ready-to-play story file.

Why?

Because A Saint in Sin City (SISC for short) promises to be my most "active" interactive fiction title to date. This is partly because I want to take yet another fresh approach to interactive fiction but mostly because I write what's real. 

As places go, Las Vegas is real busy.  24x7x365.

If you were to park yourself in the middle of any casino or shopping area in any hotel on the Las Vegas Strip you can bet the ranch there'd be no less than a dozen different things going on within 100 feet of where you were standing.

The second most interesting about Las Vegas is the permeating atmosphere.  From outside the big resort casinos to inside, the magical use of light, color, fabric, glass, water, sculpture, music, aroma and a hundred other things all go into delivering a scintillating experience for the senses.

From the shark reef of one hotel to the dolphin habitat of another to the canals of a third, the mixture of the dangerous with the delightful, the mind-boggling with the magical altogether make for an experience like no other you will find anywhere else in the world.

Only in Las Vegas do millionaires mingle with the middle-class at the same blackjack table as dusty cowboys who are served by gorgeous cocktail waitresses just two seats over

My job is to wrap all of this up and package it within the confines of a single work of fiction. Sure, interactive fiction gives me an edge but let's not dither; this stuff is hard.

For the many fans of The Food Network's Dinner: Impossible out there, let me put it this way -- now I know exactly how Robert Irvine feels!

Like Mister Robert Irvine, I always manage to deliver.  Not always on schedule but never disappointing.

7 February 2008

"If you're going through hell, keep going."

This quote by Winston Churchill describes A Saint in Sin City perfectly.  This spy thriller/murder mystery will be hard.  Damned hard.  I've implemented the plot and the sub-plots and the diversions.  The characters in the story are coming to life and the 500 acres of prime Las Vegas real estate are showing signs of life in response to this Implementor's commands.

I  am implementing a brutally honest, realistic work of crime fiction that will test every reader to his or her limits.

But Sin City is reasonable. I know that "reasonable" is a subjective term so let me qualify that statement a bit.

This Sin City interactive fiction title is reasonable in the sense that if you are observant, resourceful and creative you should make it through your mission successfully.

So don't quit.  Failure only comes when you quit.  Until you quit, no matter what your obstacles might be, you're still in the game.

Success, though, is also a subjective term also...

27 January 2008

Groove Salad

Thanks to Internet radio (as heard through iTunes on my iMac), I am Implementing with the perfect background music.  All due thanks go to Grove Salad on SomaFM.  for running a 100% commercial free radio station with a superior mix of music. Check 'em out under the Ambient category in iTunes.

Now with the gratuitous plug out of the way let's turn to the very serious business of writing.

I'm putting the finishing touches on the Casino floor of the Opimo. "Still?" you may be asking yourself, Sure some months have passed since production started but let me tell you; not a precious moment was wasted. Saints is a sophisticated spy thriller with a complex plot made up of several moving parts.

The most challenging aspect is to write the story with a fresh perspective for the player.

I've been to Las Vegas over a dozen times.  The average reader probably hasn't.

What's old hat to me is probably a brand new experience for most of you.

I can't let my seasoned Las Vegas traveler mindset get in the way of rewarding, you the reader.

I can't do that to you. I won't.  I'm not.

What's my secret? I'm implementing Opimo with continual references to my first impressions of my first night ever in Las Vegas -- at The Venetian.

Mighty fine things, those reference points.

23 January 2008

Puttin' On the Ritz

What's a $1 trillion piece of property supposed to be like, anyway?

My ever-evolving writing style is a balancing act of atmosphere infused with elements of plot and interaction with characters. You'll pass by solid gold fountains of Roman gods that even billionaires stop to admire as you try and uncover the terrorist plot underway at The Opimo even before you arrive.

Just to keep things interesting, the sudden discovery of several murder victims the day you arrive will throw a very serious wrench in your plans.

Are you solving a murder mystery? Saving the day in a spy thriller? Taking a rich man's vacation in Vegas?

All of the above.  And more.

Welcome to Sin City.

7 November 2007

A Month of Boot Camp

That's not exactly true but it sometimes feels like it.  I signed myself up for an elective creative writing course to shake things up in my mind a bit.

I'm currently in week two and I am stunned by the work load.

It's an intense month of heavy reading, writing and thinking.  I'm loving it.  Sin City production has slowed down some because there is no fucking way I am getting less than an A in this class.

That's a good thing.

You see, intentionally exposing myself to an enforced syllabus of different authors and poets and their writing styles, methods and mindsets broadens me.  Working like a young pup in the writing world is an excellent workout for an old dog like me.  My skills are getting even sharper, my imagination is being teased by a hundred or more fresh ideas a week and my mind is taking all this in with all the excitement of the kid in the proverbial candy story.

Does an author of my stature need a writing class? Of course not. I can broaden myself with a new author or two, a new fiction book that jumps off the shelf at the book store and so on but... that would only grab me along the lines of my own personal likes and tastes. I could widen my bubble but I would still be in a bubble.

Having your bubble burst, in some cases, doesn't suck at all.

Can I get better at writing beguiling fiction from this class? Of course I can.  Even Tiger Woods goes back to school. From his point of view he's never good enough.  Neither am I.

Be a tiger.

October 17, 2007

Living in Las Vegas

I'm steadily implementing the fictional Opimo megaresort and casino in Las Vegas every day. Even though I haven't flown out to Las Vegas to conduct primary research yet, I feel like I'm already living there from right here in New Jersey.

Imagination on its own is so powerful.  Take imagination and couple it with experience and you get a super writing tool.

I've been to Las Vegas more times than I can count.  On average I go twice a year.

I knew all those junkets would pay off handsomely -- and not just at the blackjack tables.  Thanks to my dozens of trips to all of the best Las Vegas casinos, restaurants, nightclubs and shows I can let my thoughts and feelings about my rich set of experiences flow into A Saint in Sin City.

Nice!

I am right now implementing "Gourmet Alley" and I am tapping into every one of the impressions I received from the glorious times I spent at The Venetian, Wynn, The Bellagio, The Mirage and all the rest.

Am I still heading to Vegas a time or two as I continue to write Sin City?

You bet!