Hello World!

My name is Relma. I’m a computer scientist, indie game scouter, and self-proclaimed Muse Hunter. This is an introductory blog post to explain who I am and what I want to do.

NOTE: This post was first published to leaflet.pub. It is reproduced on my static site blog now that I have that instead.

Muse Hunting

The primary purpose of this blog is as a place to put my thoughts, reviews, and generally maintain some public presence as a Muse Hunter in the indie video game space.

What is it?

“Muse Hunting” is a “job title” I made up. It encompasses:

• scouting for promising titles while they are in an unfinished “fledgling” (aka demo) stage
• acting as publicist and agent
• securing financial and other material resources
• QA
• and like a bunch of other things that a “backstage person” does

I’ve been doing it informally and as a hobby for the past… Scattered Stars, it has been years. To repay a game that found me and saved my life, a long time ago. And because I want to have a hand in something entering the Cultural Lexicon as a support role. It is what I was made for.

How do I do it?

My flow for Muse-Hunting generally consists of the following steps:

1. Search platforms (primarily itch and Steam) for games in their demo phase in need of resources
2. Evaluate said demo. If i fall in love with it, then…
3. See if its Vessel(s) have problems that money alone cannot fix.¹
4. If so, appoint myself the backstage person and assist in securing resources, financial and otherwise. Usually just emailing a fuck-ton of streamers and recommending them to the (one) publisher I scout for. I have noted preferences that I have. A hard one is story-focused and character-driven content. I want to have at least one character I am wholly invested in and want to see more of by the end.

What have I found so far?

It would be tedious of me to list all the games I have found worthy over the years here, but I do have such a list elsewhere.

On itch.io I maintain two Collections. The Steam equivalents unfortunately have confounding and unintuitive interfaces, so I don’t do it there:

• The Queue — A list of games in my “to-do” list to evaluate. How quick I am at actually working through that queue… is another story. To say nothing of a similar collection I have on Steam.
• It Speaks To Me — A list of games that have passed my muster. I advocate for them at every opportunity.

Career Goals?

As of now, I’m an informal scouter for a publisher². I want more, of course. I’m quite introverted, so what connections I have made reside almost entirely in DMs.
I seek a career as that “backstage person”. The music industry has (had?) a formal role called Artists and Repertoire (A&R) that encompassed much of the same ideas. The game industry… has not formalized this niche yet. I think it would be most fruitful if it did.
To be just like the legendary A&R Men of old… wouldn’t that be nice. Putting myself out there in a public, but still personal space is, I think, a good first step. Who knows how I will look back on this later.

Computer Science, Mathematics, and FOSS

I’m also a theoretical computer scientist (actually a pure mathematician in disguise) by training, and I am interested in topics in CS and the Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) space. I might write about these things as well if it suits me.