I’ve spent most of the year working on an iPhone game. After I finished WINTER TOWN this winter, I floundered around from project to project for a bit. I’m always trying to do something BIGGER and crazy when I finish something and I always crash into a wall with it. That’s basically what happened.

I have a friend that’s a programmer who really wanted to make an iPhone game, and he asked me if I had any ideas for a game. I didn’t really but I tried to come up with a few ideas. This led to me doing a little art to see what he could put together. Literally a day later, he had a very rough version of a game in place – there was the little guy I drew, the background I made, and he was moving around on it. It was really cool.

Before I knew it, I was writing out scenarios and creating characters and drawing frame after frame of animation, layers of backgrounds, and it was growing and growing before my eyes – FAST. The game began to take shape, the same way a book does as you write, and it revealed itself to be something even bigger and more ambitious than I intended. The game is something that is personal to me in a lot of ways, it works with a lot of my strengths and interests, it’s different. Another of our friends revealed himself to be in insanely gifted game-music composer. In the span of a few months the game went from an interesting diversion to something with a huge amount of potential.

My friend Sal (the programmer) suggested we write some companies to see if we could get some advice on how to market this thing. We contact CHILLINGO, who published the first ANGRY BIRDS game as well as countless other chart-toppers (Cut The Rope, Contre Jour, etc). A simple conversation quickly turned into a publishing deal. It’s been about a half a year and this thing just keeps growing. It’s exciting.

Talks with Chillingo showed us how much more the game could still be, and a few more layers were added, new gameplay elements, clarity. I’m about a third of the way to what we want to have ready for launch.

It’s been a half a year of game diversion and I started really missing writing. The game-making and the drawing and animating are all fun but I do miss the intimacy of writing, there’s a level of self-expression that’s unparalleled in writing and when I’m not doing it, I feel closed off, I get frustrated. I had an idea that was gestating in my head for a while, then I had another, and another. Then I got depressed, and I wanted to just bleed it all out, I wanted to write a book a day but I had all this game stuff to do.

I finally took my three main ideas to my editor Connie, and we agreed one of the ideas had a lot of potential and was right up my alley. I’m trying to juggle the two projects now, the game and the third book. It’s all exciting.

I love making things.