Adam Heine's Blog, page 9

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...

I am not a great writer

(LINK WARNING: The YouTube links in this post are kinda bloody -- accurate metaphors, but bloody.)

Last week I got critiques back on two of my novels. They were great critiques. I mean really great, like editor-from-Tor great. (Don't get excited. They were not from an editor at Tor, nor any other Big 5 publisher; I'm still very much in submission hell.) And this super-editor critique, that I'm extremely grateful for and will probably owe my future career to, well... it totally and utterly crus...

Gaming, Women, and Missing the Point

There is a murderer on the loose. Some of the victims are men, but the overwhelming majority are women. Yet for some reason, instead of doing something about it, this conversation is happening all over the internet right now:

A: "Help! There's a murderer on the loose!"
B: "No there isn't. You're just making up that murderer nonsense to get attention."
A: "What? But... dead bodies. Murder. Facts."
B: "Fabricated. I mean, look how obviously these pictures have been photoshopped."
A: "These pictures...

Numenera Creatures: Burden or Opportunity?

JJL asks:

So I lately got Numenera corerulebook and bestiary and read them through, fascinating stuff, but It makes me wonder about the video game.

I mean, Numenera seems to be really hard setting to make stuff for since like, one of things book states is that all animals from modern world are extinct so if someone talks about scorpion, it might not be scorpion in same way we today understand what that word means. That and the fact that bestiary is weiiiiird(in cool way) makes me wonder how t...

Wait, wait, wait: One BILLION Years?

AstroBull has a question about the Numenera setting:

I have a question about the TTON time scale. In a previous AMA response, you mention "the setting of Numenera and Torment is Earth one billion years in the future, known as the Ninth World. A billion years is as far removed from us as we are removed from being single-celled organisms." This brings up questions regarding biological evolution. As far as I am aware, many/most characters in TTON will be recognizably human, though I'm sure with c...

About What We Do

From the AMA bag of holding, Surface asks:

Not to only ask about Torment - Im genuinely curious about your involvement with that orphanage.

How did it happen, really - and so far away from home? Im imagining you were probably on a vacation and just happened to run into it and then just... felt the call? Am i correct?

And how do you finance it? Seems like an impossible task just for one guy and his wife.

Is it you who is keeping it all together or are you helping or... how does it all work really?...

About Torment's Crisis System

Two related questions from the AMA desk today.

Baudolino05 (aka Alessandro, from our wonderful fan-run Italian tumblr) asks:

What can you tell me about the quest design in T:ToN? I mean: only part of the quests will be handle through Crises, right? As for the remaining part, can we expect complex/interrelated quest-lines? Will they feature puzzle-solving/exploration elements like in the original Torment? No combat at all, right?

Along similar lines, Surface Rfl says:

One additional question more...

Great Artists Steal

Thomas Hennessey says:

I've always figured the best way to be a good writer is to be a great reader first. Is the same true of game design? Have you come across a game that made you think, woah that's cool, I gotta use that somehow.

I think that's absolutely true, of game design, of writing, of any kind of art.

Because you have to know what's out there. More than anything else, people enjoy novelty. You can't be novel if you don't know what others have already done.

(I guess if you're not selling...