A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

A screenshot of our GoFundMe page.  Hello, everybody. I just want to update you on the status of our new film, which doesn't have a title yet, so we refer to it as Untitled Sequel to Ronnie and the Pursuit of the Elusive Bliss.  As you know, this time the folks at Popcorn Sky in New York City want to make a true feature-length film, with multiple locations, a larger cast, and a story with a running time of around 90 minutes.  This, of course, is a far more ambitious project than our previous ones. So far, we've managed to do four films of varying lengths with minimal budgets and small casts; the ones I've written on my own - at least as far as first drafts go - have two, three characters at most.  The film to which I contributed the least -El Grande de Corona - has a cast of five:  Juan Carlos Hernandez Adria K. Woomer-Hernandez Steve Arons Matthew Martin Ward Natalie Hernandez Clearly, we're not quite ready to compete with Cecil B. DeMille in size of cast or sc...

Ka-Boom! A Chinese fighter burns in its handstand in Cold Waters' Strike from the Sea Single Mission. © 2017 Killerfish Games  I've been playing Killerfish Games' Cold Waters for nearly nine months, and all this time I've thought that there were only eight Single Mission engagements in this 2017 submarine combat simulator and spiritual heir to MicroProse's1988 classic, Red Storm Rising.  How wrong I was.  There are 17 Single Missions in all, starting with the relatively easy sub-versus-sub  The Duel all the way to Foreign Trade , a sub-versus-convoy mission. In addition, the last six missions allow players to take on the burden of command of either Soviet or Chinese subs and pit their boats against the best antisubmarine warfare (ASW) forces in the U.S. Navy. I have to admit that I would have discovered the nine missions that follow Junks on Parade had I bothered to read the manual (I've glanced at it a few times, but since it's a digital PDF document and no...

  A screenshot from the script of Ronnie and the Pursuit of the Elusive Bliss Hello there, Dear Reader. I’m writing this post because the folks at Popcorn Sky Productions – including this blogger – are starting work on a new film project that follows the characters from Ronnie and the Pursuit of the Elusive Bliss into the realm of feature length films. The entire cast of that short film – Adria K. Woomer-Hernandez, Anthony Hernandez, and Juan Carlos Hernandez – who’s also our director – will be back in their roles of Ronnie, Jerry, and Guillermo Ronderos. I will return as well as one of the writers, plus I will be doing double duty as associate producer. While we do not as of yet have a title, much less a complete screenplay, we have a good idea about the story, its themes, and its characters. Here’s how Adria and Juan describe the project: The film is to consider the issues of political extremism (which we satirized in Ronnie) but this time around, let's look at the costs ...

  A "beauty shot" of a 688-class (Los Angeles-class) SSN in the North Atlantic. (Screenshot from Cold Waters. All game elements in the screenshots on this post are © 2017 Killerfish Games.) Well, Dear Reader, I did it. After nearly a week of playing through Cold Waters’ North Atlantic 1984 campaign, I fought the Soviet Red Banner Northern Fleet ( Severnyy flot ) as a U.S. Navy fast attack boat skipper – and won. This time around, I had a better success-to-failure ratio in the campaign, compared to my performance in the South China Sea 2000 scenario, even though I commanded Flight I Los Angeles- class SSNs (the best boats [1] in service in 1984) and didn’t benefit from the more advanced “flights” of the class or the larger, better armed Seawolf (SSN-21) submarine. Commander, Submarine Force, Atlantic Fleet (COMSUBLANT) sent me on 15 or 16 missions (I don’t keep a detailed log when I play Cold Waters, and the game only lists completed missions on the Achievements to Date s...

My latest Achievements to Date report.  All game elements in this and other screenshots are © 2017 Killerfish Games.  After I completed the South China Sea 2000 campaign late last month, I told myself that as fun and rewarding it was to finally complete a “tour of duty” in Cold Waters, it might be a good idea if I waited a few months to tackle one of the other two campaigns in the game – North Atlantic 1984 and North Atlantic 1968. The Strategic Transit Map. It's a much-refined version of the one in 1988's Red Storm Rising . I had several good reasons, including the need to focus on a new screenplay for Popcorn Sky Productions, the fact that I spend way too much time at my desk 24/7, and the realization that I’m not in my late 20s and early 30s (which is how old I was when I played MicroProse Software’s Red Storm Rising, the game that inspired the designers of Cold Waters ). And, more relevantly, I was bothered by my performance as a submarine skipper in the South China Sea ...

  Screenshot of the New Campaign page on Cold Waters .  © 2017 Killerfish Games As you know, last summer I purchased a copy of Killerfish Games’ Cold Waters, a submarine combat simulator based on the premise “What would naval warfare have been like, from a submariner’s perspective, if the Cold War had gone hot?” Cold Waters was released in 2017 as a spiritual successor to the original MicroProse Software game Red Storm Rising (1988), which was designed by Sid Meier and is based on the submarine-related parts of Tom Clancy’s eponymous 1986 novel. Indeed, Cold Waters has many features that RSR veterans will recognize, such as the game’s mix of missions ( Training, Single Battles, and Campaigns ), as well as the basic setting that puts the player in command of a nuclear fast attack submarine in a hypothetical Third World War. In the eight months since I bought Cold Waters on Steam, I have slowly worked my way up the mission tree from Training to Single Battles to the full Cam...