Char

@alphachar.bsky.social

1578 Followers 918 Following

making Sparrow Warfare with @martinpi ~ writing games ~ teaching writing & yoga ~ 'when the going gets weird, the weird turn pro' ~ alphachar.com

Two smiling people beyond hype to travel to China next week - the people are Charlene Putney and Martin Pichlmair, here holding their new business cards
Screenshot from the game Sparrow Warfare, where the valiant little sparrow is battling agains the boss of Level 3: The Poacher.
"No Ragrets" tattoo meme
Image advertising a talk at ChinaJoy China Game Developers Conference on July 31st 2026. Remixing Strategy: Designing Hyper-Local, Hyper-Global Games In their 27 years of indie game development across 19 commercial releases, Martin and Charlene have learned a lot about turning game ideas into finished works. This talk is a reflection on how many ideas behind games are globally connected, while rooted in the culture their designers come from. While working on their new game, strategic deckbuilder Sparrow Warfare, Martin and Charlene explored the history of strategy games: from ancient board games to 17th-century Austrian card games, mahjong, and today’s deckbuilders. From this, they realised how many mechanics from older games remain largely unexplored in modern deckbuilders, which often focus on a narrow set of familiar systems. They also discovered how many strategy games from around the world are connected as if through a global web of evolving ideas and mutations. For a Danish studio presenting in China, this highlights the balance between designing hyper-locally (drawing on personal and cultural influences), and designing hyper-globally (building on game ideas that have travelled across centuries and continents) to resonate with the widest audience possible. In this talk, they will share their collective creative process, and offer three ideas for game developers to apply in their own projects: how to find overlooked mechanics, how to transform personal influences into design ideas, and how to use remix culture to create fresh and engaging work.
Martin showing off our haunted music from Level 2, and our most haunted bird: Macawbre!
Three jolly cooperators sharing a beer in the sun
The only war Ireland should wage is one of calm logic against the swollen belligerents of the world who expect other people’s children to take up arms against each other, to sacrifice their precious lives in a trillion-dollar theatre of fire and death. We’ll explain to them that our national identity is founded on the edict that no political change is worth the shedding of a single drop of human blood. So, we’ll mind our own business and they can fuck right off.
Quasimorph
Panning video over Tromsø, Norway
Some colourful bird illustrations
Heron at the lakes in Copenhagen
"A life spent making mistakes is not only more honourable, but more useful, than a life spent doing nothing." - George Bernard Shaw
A tiny snowman waves in central Copenhagen
A lovely review of NUTS on Steam
a circle filled with lovely positive emojis
Cover of “Negative Space”
Cover for the book “Coffin Moon”
Cover for the book “Pilgrim”
Cover for the book “A Short Stay In Hell”
Cover for the book “The Lesser Dead”
Cover for the book “Come Closer”
Cover of the book “Old Soul”
Cover of the book “The Buffalo Hunter Hunter”
A picture of a spooky owl named Howl with the rating 12/10 for spookiness, and the tagline "two bananas short of a fruitbowl"
Far Side cartoon where there are two guys on camels in the desert, there is nothing to see for miles but endless desert. The caption reads: "Hold still, Omar. Now look up. Yep. You've got something in your eye, all right. Could be sand."
A little snippet of a screenshot from Sparrow Warfare
A leaderboard for the game Sparrow Warfare, showing pi in first place and alphachar in second place.
A collection of bird tiles made by remixing, collaging, recolouring nad vectorising public domain bird illustrations along with other props
A photo of my work in progress shawl: lots of different kinds of stitches in shades of white, grey, yellow and blue.
A gif of our game, showing progressive zooming in on the Beekeeper villain and a selection of tiles.
Surrealism is the “invisible ray” which will one day enable us to win out over our opponents. “You are no longer trembling, carcass.” This summer the roses are blue; the wood is of glass. The earth, draped in its verdant cloak, makes as little impression upon me as a ghost. It is living and ceasing to live which are imaginary solutions. Existence is elsewhere.
Chinese new year talisman for the Year of the Snake: "keep the things that we enjoy, move forward towards our goals"
Four beautiful calves sunning themselves in a green field
Book cover of "I Gave You Eyes & You Looked Toward Darkness" by Irene Solà
The rabbit Frank in Donnie Darko saying "I can do anything I want and so can you"
Text of poem by Morgan Harper Nichols: “Let July be July. Let August be August. And let yourself just be even in the uncertainty. You don’t have to fix everything. You don’t have to solve everything. And you can still find peace and grow in the wild of changing things.”
Me adding the word "should" to my "muted words and tags" list. FOREVER.