When I’m not in total writer introvert mode, I occasionally hang out with this Western martial arts group whose members gather in a secret location to (a) hit one another with blunt objects and (b) hack up innocent pop bottles with sharpened versions of those same objects.
Although hitting one another remains the group’s core mission, over the years there have been spinoff projects, such as The Mongoliad. One of the group’s long-term goals has been the creation of an accurate (and fun) Western martial arts simulator, aka a swordfighting video game that doesn’t suck. As group founder Neal Stephenson explains above, they’re finally ready to get to work on that, so they’re doing a Kickstarter campaign to raise $500,000 in funding.
The game’s working title is CLANG. You’ll find more details on the CLANG Kickstarter page, here. The funding period runs through July 9, and as of this posting they’re already more than a fifth of the way towards the half-million-dollar goal.
(N.B. As was the case with The Mongoliad, I’m not directly involved in the project. At least, not yet. But you can be sure I’ll be dropping by the clubhouse to help playtest the game prototype.)