Greg Schueler

Well, it’s been nearly a year since we started this blog for our humble game studio, and now we’re finally ready to share what we’ve been working on. Drum roll please….

AQUAMARINE is a hand-drawn, story-driven exploration game in an alien ocean, with an original soundtrack by Jeremy Malvin (aka Chrome Sparks). Inspired by the comics of French artist Moebius, synth music, and ‘70s-era psychedelic science-fiction, the game tells a story of perseverance, adaptation, and braving the unknown.

You play as a space explorer who crash lands on an alien planet covered in water, and has to journey through the ocean in their humble escape pod to reach their ship and get off the strange world. The gameplay will focus on collecting and managing limited resources, navigating and upgrading your pod, deciphering the planet’s ecosystem, and unraveling its mysterious history through exploration and puzzle solving.

We’ve still got a long path of development ahead of us. We’ll be launching on Kickstarter in September 2018, when we’ll also have a full demo for free download, so keep an eye out for that announcement. Your support and feedback is immensely appreciated!

Thanks for reading and giving our passion project a look. You can learn more about AQUAMARINE and stay updated on our progress at the links below.

https://www.aquamarinegame.com/

Since you mention it, I think I will start that race war. I could’ve swung either way? But now I’m definitely spending the next 4 years converting your daughters to lesbianism; I’m gonna eat all your guns. Swallow them lock stock and barrel and spit bullet casings onto the dinner table; I’ll give birth to an army of mixed-race babies. With fathers from every continent and genders to outnumber the stars, my legion of multiracial babies will be intersectional as fuck and your swastikas will not be enough to save you, because real talk, you didn’t stop the future from coming. You just delayed our coronation. We have the same deviant haircuts we had yesterday; we are still getting gay-married like nobody’s business because it’s still nobody’s business; there’s a Muslim kid in Kansas who has already written the schematic for the robot that will steal your job in manufacturing, and that robot? Will also be gay, so get used to it: we didn’t manifest the mountain by speaking its name, the buildings here are not on your side just because you make them spray-painted accomplices. These walls do not have genders and they all think you suck. Even the earth found common cause with us the way you trample us both, oh yeah: there will be signs, and rainbow-colored drum circles, and folks arguing ideology until even I want to punch them but I won’t, because they’re my family, in that blood-of-the-covenant sense. If you’ve never loved someone like that you cannot outwaltz us, we have all the good dancers anyway. I’ll confess I don’t know if I’m alive right now; I haven’t heard my heart beat in days, I keep holding my breath for the moment the plane goes down and I have to save enough oxygen to get my friends through. But I finally found the argument against suicide and it’s us. We’re the effigies that haunt America’s nights harder the longer they spend burning us, we are scaring the shit out of people by spreading, by refusing to die: what are we but a fire? We know everything we do is so the kids after us will be able to follow something towards safety; what can I call us but lighthouse, of course I’m terrified. Of course I’m a shroud. And of course it’s not fair but rest assured, anxious America, you brought your fists to a glitter fight. This is a taco truck rally and all you have is cole slaw. You cannot deport our minds; we won’t hold funerals for our potential. We have always been what makes America great.

IF YOU ARE READING THIS, CHANCES ARE YOU GO ON THE INTERNET EVERYDAY. THE FCC IS NOW PLANNING ON REPEALING NET NEUTRALITY. THIS MEANS THAT POPULAR WEBSITES WILL RUN SLOWLY UNTIL YOU PAY AN EXTRA FEE. WE WOULD NO LONGER HAVE THE PRIVILEGE OF USING WEBSITES AND RESEARCHING FOR FREE. 

Launch date: 5 Sept. 1977 Current date: 5 Sept. 2017 Distance from Earth: 20.882.261.512 km

Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today to say our goodbyes to our dear friend America, who died recently after a brief, intense battle with fascism and a long, slow battle with carbs. Thank you all for coming out to help say farewell. It’s not easy. But at least America died doing what it loved most: deep-frying Halloween candy while white men tried to explain to women what jazz is.

America was sick for a really long time. In the early stages, I think we were all in denial. You could tell that America was unwell—public displays of brutality, deeply internalized prejudice, “Entourage”—but it seemed curable. Just a case of plain old electile dysfunction. We thought that we’d caught the fascism early, but, as we now know, it had metastasized. America was more Florida than country by the end.

America was born right here, in America, and lived here its entire life. America was always about family. It is survived by its similarly ill father, Britain, and its large brood of children: baseball, Google, fireworks, losing your fingers to fireworks, giving your Uber driver only four stars because he talked to you, thinking granola is healthy, Chicago (the place), “Chicago” (the musical), “Chicago” (the movie adaptation of the musical), Chicago (the band), “Chicago Fire,” “Chicago Med,” “Chicago P.D.,” “Chicago Justice,” “Chicago ‘Chicago’ ” (a show about the Chicago production of the musical “Chicago,” coming to NBC this fall), and a bunch of wars.

I’d personally be nowhere without America. America was there when I was born, when I got married, when I saw Janet Jackson’s nipple at the Super Bowl. Remember that? After that happened, none of us slept for days, because we had never seen the pointy part of a boob on our TVs before, and it really upset us. America was really cool that way. It would always get mad when you’d see the pointy part of a boob on a TV. I’m gonna miss that.

However, we should not dwell on the loss of our dear country, friend, and place where all the Cheesecake Factories and Lids stores are. Today, let’s celebrate America’s life, and remember all of the remarkable things it accomplished and how many actors playing Spider-Man who keep getting cuter and younger were inside of it. America gave us so much. And, boy, did it look good for its age. America was two hundred and forty-one years old when it died, but it didn’t look a day over a hundred and sixty-four! It looked so young, it could’ve been the very same America that put its own citizens in internment camps!

America got a bunch of things really right. Mostly how to put food inside other food. Anyone can just eat a chicken. But in a duck?! In a turkey?! In a gun?! No one is going to forget the Turduckenun any time soon. America was so inventive that way. And, I mean, everyone does silly stuff when they’re young. America was beautiful, too. Sure, it was a little lumpy, and you could always see its Florida through its pants, but it just got hotter with age. So hot. It was so, so hot by the time it died. Almost too hot to live in.

If there’s anything we should take away from this tragedy, it’s that you should always check yourself for fascism, especially around your midsection. It’s easy enough to do in the shower. If you catch it early, it can be cleared up with a rigorous regimen of local elections and books and yoga. But America was cocky. Nothing bad had ever happened to it before! It assumed this fascism would pass, just like the Second World War and “Entourage” had.

Scott Listfield