Forever Searching among the Scattered Stars...

My name is Relma. I'm a computer scientist, indie game scouter, and self-proclaimed Muse Hunter. This is an introductory blog post just to put myself out there.

NOTE: This post was first published to . I will be hosting this blog on a static site soon, but Hugo is more time-consuming to configure than I anticipated.

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" generally 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. 1.

    Search platforms (primarily itch and Steam) for games in their demo phase in need of resources

  2. 2.

    Evaluate said demo. If i fall in love with it, then...

  3. 3.

    See if its Vessel(s) have problems that money alone cannot fix.1

  4. 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 major one is story-focused 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 I maintain two Collections. The Steam equivalents unfortunately have confounding an d 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 publisher.2 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.