this has been a weird and intense week. my book, the work of two years, was finally released. it sold out twice at gdc. reading it at my release party, one of my closest friends was so moved he not only cried but spontaneously developed a nosebleed. after having the OAK-U-TRON tucked in a back hallway of the venus patrol party, a crowd of us wheeled it across the dance floor of the main room despite the protests of the party organizer. later we presented it at gdc: we explained the occupy movement to a room full of game developers. then we had them all work together to guide us through the game as we played blind. (we didn’t get very far, but there were cheers when we got through the first door.) we debuted the pirate kart at gdc, which contained over 1000 games by the time gdc ended. jeremy penner, the founder of glorioustrainwrecks, met the creator of klik & play. i signed a lot of books and met a lot of people i’d only known from the internet. i hugged jaime woo. we took everyone from my book release home and showed them death race 2000. our beautiful kitty, meowzbow, died after a long infection, in our arms. we’ll eulogize him later – we’re leaving soon to take his little body to a park. before we do, i want to leave this game here.

during gdc sparky and i discussed the idea of a drinking game with a computer opponent, but where the human player drinks real alcohol. we really liked the idea of a quantity that has different meaning in the game and outside of it: the virtual opponent’s shotglasses stack up, but she’s a computer and the same amount of drinks have a very different consequence to a human player. we liked the ambiguity of performing a physical endurance contest against a virtual opponent: how can you tell how close she is to losing, or if it’s even possible for her to lose at all?

i didn’t have my laptop on hand, so i had to borrow someone else’s. soon the battery was dying, and because the battery was dying i couldn’t connect to the internet and mail the images to sparky. so i took a photo of the images with my camera phone and sent that instead. we ended up really liking the gunked-up smudginess of the camera phone shots and let it drive the visual style of the game.

after the last day of gdc, a bunch of us went to noisebridge (a hacker space in the mission), where stephen lavelle was hosting a game jam. finally, an opportunity to finish our game! we finished it, sent out for rum and vodka, and had our first playtesting session.

click here to play DRINK! warning: the computer opponent’s tolerance is pretty high. i suggest using small shots. our second playtester, andrew “handsome” gray, had to tap out and spent the rest of the night on the verge of throwing up. a massively socially irresponsible game? we’re probably going to revise and update it at some point, but i like how the first experiment went.