I did a panel at PAX Prime with Mike Selinker last week. We talked about Thornwatch, where the game is now, how it got here and then I broke down some of the core mechanics. You can watch the entire thing on Twitch right here. If you have not been able to play it, this is the most complete look at the game and how it plays. Let me know what you think!

Being a public person is a strange business, particularly when you have spent the first part of your life being taught time and time again that you belong nowhere. I would not trade it for anything, of course, and I was a spectacularly "interesting" employee, so I'm not certain there's really an alternative for me anymore.

This year’s PAX Prime was the 17th PAX, which is pretty hard for me to believe. It also marks 10 years of PAX Prime here in Seattle. I can still remember my wife Kara, pregnant with Gabe during the very first PAX at the Meydenbauer convention center. He started 4th grade yesterday and will turn 10 years old on September 9th. It all happened so terrifyingly fast.

Making an update while PAX is ongoing still feels pretty weird. I mean, if you worked at a gaming news site, I guess this would be, like, your whole show. I suppose the reality is that everyone is updating constantly about the show, and everything else, professionally or otherwise. "Writing" and "Living" are two distinct gears for me. It's a big lever and it's hard to pull.

Gabriel is constantly impressing himself with what he calls his thinkin's, which are like little caltrops for the brain. He once posited that while it was technically true that each cock exists within its own "timeline," under certain rare conditions it would be possible for a cock to block itself.

I had assumed, largely because I was directly told, that the conglomeration known as Goo-Tube was purchasing Twitch. It certainly seemed to map out, what with Twitch cracking down on copyright in exactly the same way YouTube had. But that's apparently just hedge trimming now, work that must be done in advance of acquisition by any party. Amazon picked them up. On accident?

The most recent cinematic trailer for League of Legends got me thinking about the game again. I’ve played a lot of it over the years but I’m not sure I’ve ever gotten this into the strategy of it. I’ve always liked it, but I’m actually trying not to suck at it now and that’s new for me. I’ve been watching the LCS matches and I’m surprised just how much I enjoy watching other people play a video game.

We brought it back up for awhile so people could harvest their favorite stuff off of there, but we're gonna flip the big switch here in a couple days. I have a lot of favorites I'll be copying and then subsequently pasting: it was a great site, and a lot of people worked to make it so.

As you can see by Mike's posts, Thornwatch development continues! While the game is not quite ready for large-scale demoing, we will be conducting a limited playtest at PAX Prime 2014. Playtesters will be drawn from the Thornwatch email list: we'll mail that list Tuesday with a questionnaire (the most important question being, "Do you have a PAX badge"), and randomly select playtesters from qualified respondents on Wednesday.

Brian said people wanted to know what we were bringing to the show, so I got the banner image from Kiko. You can click it, and it will become larger as a result.

His panel is now located in the Main Theatre (Benaroya Hall), and begins at 5 PM on Friday. He has a signing at 6:30 at the Paramount Theatre later that night.

The things people are willing to enter into text fields perpetually surprises me.

We've got a thing going right now where we are doing that. So, any Penny Arcade Print or Print Set from the store will get signed, and of course any of the daily strips. If you have liked one, or you think for some inexplicable reason that another person might like it, the orange button in the upper right of any comic will take you to the store. Okay, that's it. See you around.

There's a new playtest for Thornwatch coming to PAX Prime, one that plays around with the systems a little bit. Jamie had an idea counter to a decision on the game's fundamental focus, and she proved that contentious ground with an adventure. That adventure forms the core of what you might play at Prime. I'll let him do the rest of it, but I will also put a link to the newsletter sign-up because newsletter subs are how he determines his worth as a person now. Well, newsletter subs, and maintaining an atmosphere of psychological terror.

The Thornwatch “design team” is really just five people. There’s me obviously but I've got help from Kiko, Jamie, Fehlauer, and Kenneth. It’s still sort of a side project so a lot of the work we do on it happens over lunch. We pick a restaurant near the office and work out whatever design issues need to get resolved. I did not plan it this way when assembling my team but they are all very different types of gamers and so we end up getting a lot of really great points of view. Kiko and Kenneth are all about clear and concise rules and mechanics while Jamie and Feh tend to be more interested in the “feel” of the game and the story elements. I usually end up listening to both sides and then make a final decision. I have my own ideas about how the game should work but I honestly really love being convinced of a better solution.

The kids on the server made their statues out of wool, presumably for the wide range of colors. Their intense flammability was, we can guess, not conscious portion of the decision matrix.