It was a very ambitious project that could succeed only with all of us pulling together in the traces, and that never seemed to happen. (I'll save the screenshot for a later post.)

It all actually came together in a working, high-res build with ambient sound, music, dialogue built using our new editor, and so on. Next up, I'll share some quotes from the sources that are shaping our upcoming project!

'Machinery is the new Messiah.' - Henry Ford There is, however, another method more simple, flexible, and rapid, which has not yet occurred to nature at all.'. 'Nature has found only one method of organizing living matter. Like a dream that slips away.' - U'Netaneh Tokef (part of the Yom Kippur liturgy) 'In the seed of the city of the just, a malignant seed is hidden, in its turn: the certainty and pride of being in the right - and of being more just than many others who call themselves more just than the just.” - Italo Calvino, Hidden Cities And evil that can run itself a thousand years, no need to tend it.” - Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian 'When God made man the devil was at his elbow. 'In attempting to construct sentient machines we are not irreverently usurping God's power of creating souls, rather we are providing new mansions for the souls that He creates.'- A.M. 'I firmly believe that before many centuries more, science will be the master of manįor the engines he will have invented will be beyond his strength to control.' - Henry Adams (in 1862 people already felt this way!) “Man’s very soul is due to the machines it is a machine-made thing: he thinks as he thinks, and feels as he feels, through the work that machines have wrought upon him, and their existence is quite as much a sine qua non for his, as his for theirs.” - Samuel Butler, Erewhon For those who might be curious, here are some of the quotes I gathered during my literary roving: That included fiction such as The Cyberiad by Stanisław Lem, but also a fair amount of just background philosophy and nonfiction about our relationship to machines and about some of the game's themes.Īlong the way, I thought it would be neat to have epigrams when you quit a game session or something, but that idea was (rightfully) scrapped. Because I dove into Primordia without any preamble, I drew mostly on what I'd already read, watched, and played, but I also tried to buttress that with other things. In any case, I don't mean to catalogue every book I've read, or write a paean to Snorri - a man who exceeded me not only in my avocation as a writer but in my day job as a lawyer - but simply to briefly touch on him before sharing some quotes that help give a flavor for where we're going.īefore embarking on a new project, I try to immerse myself in the artistic genre to get a feel for the core themes and images that provide the 'form' in that particular artform. But he is potentially also the author of Njal's Saga, which would give him even more importance.

At a minimum, one must attest to him The Heimskringla, the Prose Edda (from which derives much of what we know of Norse mythology), and books on skaldic poetry, each of which has been of great use to me. To the extent there is a single author whose influence on our next project is greatest, it is Snorri. (As an aside: the Icelandic patronymic naming system is the direct source of the fabrinymics in Primordia.) Also, the word for 'horse' in Iceland is 'hross' how delightful!) Anyway, we never did see the Northern Lights, but little did I know that Snorri would come to wield such a weight influence over me in the years to come. ('Ole Worm' - which we also mispronounced - got his as well. Despite the fact that the travelers were all well-intentioned, purportedly mature, multiculturalists, at least 2% of our conversation all week consisted of simply saying the name 'Snorri Stuluson' and laughing at its strange sound. There is much that can be said about that trip, but relevant to this post is that it was when first I heard of Snorri Sturluson. His birthday being in January, this was not an impossible request, and somehow we concluded that the best way to realize it was to set off for Iceland. A dozen years ago, my dad turned 60 and declared that what he really wanted for his birthday was to see the Aurora Borealis.

Primordia goliath