Adam Heine's Blog, page 8

Read the entirety of "The Patch Man"

My Pathfinder story, "The Patch Man," has now been published in its entirety. If you're like me, and you don't like reading something that you can't finish, well you can finish it now: chapter one, chapter two, chapter three, and chapter four.

(And if you're better than me, and read things the moment you can read any part of it, know that today you can be complete.)

And oh my gosh, I just realized I never told you how this came to be!

It probably never occurred to you. I mean, I'm the Design Lea...

Favorite Games of 2014

It's still January. I'm not late.

Well, except for the part where these are games I played in 2014, as opposed to games that may have come out in 2014. Whatever.

BANNER SAGA
I've talked about this one. It looks pretty. It sounds lovely. It asks me to make hard choices and then question them, and for some reason I love it all the more because of this. I'm thinking of playing through it again on Hard.

I will probably fail. I don't actually care.

THE LONGEST JOURNEY
Adventure games are kind of my thi...

Copyeditor Bar Jokes

Click to embiggen.

Q: Game quality on a variety of systems?

Taking advantage of asking me anything, Steve says:

If one writes a book, the reader gets exactly what the writer put across.  Doesn't matter what format they read it in - it's basically the same experience. But with video games, everyone’s machines are different, from ancient to cutting edge. With all the variables of OS, RAM, video cards, and everything else thrown in as well.  Which have changed since you began the project and will have changed again by th...

The Patch Man is up at Paizo.com

My latest short story, "The Patch Man," is up at paizo.com (at least the first chapter is -- the rest will come soon). It takes place in the world of the Pathfinder RPG which, if you're not familiar with it, is very similar to D&D, but with a lot of its own twists. "The Patch Man" is about a half-fiend named Blit who makes a living cleaning up evidence for the less-reputable guilds in Pathfinder's largest city, until he starts getting in over his head.

This marks the second short story I'v...

5 Weird Facts About 2015

These facts are weird to me, at least. Most of these are true this year. All are recently true.

(1) We've lived in Chiang Mai longer than we had lived in San Diego.

San Diego's our home, man. At least it used to be. But we've been living in a place where all TV shows are geo-blocked (and also available down the street for $1/disc), and where Sprite is pronounced "sapai," for more years than any place I've lived in except the place I was born.

(2) We've been attending our current church longer th...

How to Get Schooled by a 4-Year-Old

My daughter Anica is beautiful, ruthless, and ridiculously smart. She embodies every connotation of the word precocious.

In this chapter, she and I play a game called "I'm Thinking of an Animal" -- kind of a kindergarten version of Twenty Questions. (I designed it myself. I'm so very smart.)

Sometimes, Anica gets bored and messes with me.

Me: "I'm thinking of an animal that's black and white." Anica: "A cow!" Me: "AND it has wings and swims very well." Anica: "A birdcowfish!"
— Adam Heine (@adamh...

Q&A: Gold Novella available anywhere else?

Bester says:

Sigh... Are you planning on selling "From the Depths" on any site at all, separately from other guys?

Not at this time.

So first, the Gold novella was written as a work-for-hire, which means all the rights to it belong to inXile and not to me. So "I" (Adam) will not be selling the novella anywhere because contractually I cannot.

"We" (inXile) do not currently have any plans to sell the Gold novella -- nor the other novellas in the From the Depths compilation -- in any way beyond how...

From the Depths: Gold now available

As part of the Kickstarter campaign for Torment, we offered a series of give novellas called From the Depths. The novella I wrote (the Gold one, with super secret hidden title Gate to the Abyss) has been published and is available now.

This marks the second time I've been published (for anything greater than 25 words, that is). Still no novel, but I'm working my way up there! And look: I have two fans!

The enemy of your enemy can still kill you.

After the destruction of Shuenha, Luthiya and the...

Torment Game Modes?

From the AMA pile, Arumaxx89 says:

As you said, you want neither to encourage nor prohibit save scumming.

So I want to ask you a question: "Will there be different game modes in T:ToN?" (like, for instance, trial of iron in pillars of eternity or ironmode in XCOM)

We haven't finalized our game modes yet by any means, but we are tentatively planning some sort of ironman/permadeath mode. Of course "permadeath" doesn't mean as much to a tough-to-kill castoff of the Changing God, but it would mean...