WHAT'S ON THE STOVE?October 1998
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see the most recent version.WHAT'S ON THE STOVE?
October 1998
Here at Looney Labs we always have a lot of projects simmering away on the stove. Some are on the front burners, almost ready to be released; others are on the back burners, waiting for time, money, or other resources to become available. Still others are just ideas, only partially baked and still in the oven.
We have so many products brewing in the lab that we sometimes have a hard time deciding what we should work on next. Soon, thanks to the internet, we'll be able to let our customers participate in this process. Hopefully next week we'll have our new product survey ready for you to fill out and send in. If you can't wait until then to give us feedback, you can send email directly to us at LooneyLabs@wunderland.com.
The Cake That Baked Itself: A humorous kid's book I wrote and small press published in 1988. I plan to put the whole thing up on the web, but I have to scan in all the cartoons first. To make it a product, I need to dig up the originals and take 'em to Kinko's.
Proton: Our 1998 gift product will be a new game called Proton.
Jake's Saloon: a Live Action Role Playing game for 8 players and 2 hosts. I wrote it in 1993 as a submission for a book series that never got past its pilot volume; it's completely written but hasn't been playtested. We're planning a very small beta release, intended for use on guinea pigs.
Jigsaw Puzzles: We have one available now, a pyramid puzzle from Xmas '94; others we plan would be made using some of the best long hair photos in my Ebooks. The first two we have planned are Eating Wild Chives and Mar's Marvelous Hair.
Enchanted Tiles: The story is already here on the web, but to revive this as a product we'd need to get someone to produce a new run of tiles like the ones Kristin made for the first release, back in 1990. (We're hoping Eeyore will bid on this job.)
Stoners in the Haze: an Empire Publications edition of my Cannabis Cup report. This just needs page layout work.
Kirby's Elevator: an Empire Publications edition of this story, currently available only on the web. This needs illustrations.
Blank Fluxx cards: We had blanks available for the first edition, and they were very popular; but since the card size changed in the new edition, they're obsolete. Since everybody wants blanks, we plan to ask Carta Mundi to run us off a bunch of them in shrink-wrapped 10-packs during the next Fluxx print run.
Monochrome Chess set: Monochrome chess is a lot of fun but it works best if you have two identical chess sets, which not everyone has. So we're thinking to buy bulk chess pieces in a single color and do a small run of Monochrome Chess sets.
Shipwrecked survivor story T-shirt: A story I wrote years ago to be printed onto T-shirts, but which we never got around to. Will we ever? I need to get the story on-line for people to read before this question can be fairly answered...
Image wall postcard book: One of those 10 or 20 card collections that you find in the gift area of bookshops, featuring my most popular photographs.
Plush Iceland characters: Years ago, Icehouse Games sold a run of plush pyramids with faces, made for us by Carol Kocian. These abstract toys were the inspiration for (among other things) the weekly Iceland cartoon. We've have a few unsold from the old Icehouse days that we might make available for sale; if they sell, we might then contract with Carol for a new batch.
Plastic icehouse pieces: For years we've been dreaming of making the ultimate icehouse set, featuring injection-molded, high-impact translucent colored plastic pyramids. This level of manufacturing has always been out of our reach financially, and it still is... but if Fluxx and Aquarius do well enough in the coming year, we hope to make this a reality in the year 2000. Until then, all we can offer you is an origami set.
Zarcana: Although designed to be played with an icehouse set and a tarot deck, this incredibly fine game by John Cooper can also be played with two sided flat tokens instead of pyramids. So, we intend to publish a Zarcana tarot deck, packaged with punch-out tokens, as a stand-alone game product, hopefully in 1999. John is currently busy defining the card layout and interviewing artists.
Rules for Icehouse Games: The suite of games you can play with an Icehouse set continues to grow; by the time we make plastic pieces, we expect to be able to fill a book with rules for games you can play with the set.
Right to the Bottom: A strange film project I created. We can't legally distribute copies until we get the necessary permissions, and don't even know where to begin in obtaining them. So this is way back on that back burner.
Power Brokers: A micro Monopoly game expansion designed by Keith Baker.
