Game-Maker: Sandbox Edition Guide
The Bard of Bizarre
The Bard of Bizarre is Lewis “Lewie” Moten III’s song project, and his hobo clown, Doc Leo, PhD (Comedic Science), is its face. The Bard has one rule: the smaller and more overlooked the thing, the bigger the song it deserves. So the goat at the edge of the manger, the loaf left in the basket, the fly in the room and the remote lost in the couch each get the full treatment (a gospel choir, a goth anthem, an opera, a trembling monologue), sung with a straight face and a lot of love. The songs are silly but never mean, and fine for the whole family. It began with Christian songs and grew from there; so far the songs fall into five collections:
- Bizarre gospels: the wrong detail of a Bible story, taken very seriously. The goat nobody painted in Third Goat from the Left, the smallest seed with the biggest dreams in Mustard Seed Hustle, the camel left holding the rich man’s gold in Thread the Needle, Brother Camel, and the bread nobody picked when the five thousand were fed in Loaf #13 (Left in the Basket). They sort of make sense, and that’s the trouble.
- Mundane epics: tiny everyday disasters sung like the end of the world. A Fly Named Carl, Where’s the Remote?!, a slice of cheesecake in The Great Dairy Reckoning of 3:17 A.M., a borrowed pink loofah in Cleanse Me, O Loofah, But Leave My Soul, and a haunted house with an eight-year-old who isn’t scared in I Screamed, She Smirked.
- Villain anthems: evil plans on a very small scale, with maniacal laughter. In Certified Rat Tickler, Doc Leo turns mad scientist with a real certificate in rat tickling (Lewis earned one) and plots to raise a legion of giggling rats.
- Shakespeare in Sweatpants: seventeen spoken monologues by a man in a starched ruff and gray sweatpants about the most dramatic things that ever happened to him, like a lost pen, a dead ficus named Gerald and the self-checkout. The game puts him on stage at open-mic night.
- Veni, Vidi, Risi!: six songs in Latin, as grand as Rome, about a dog who breaks wind at a senators’ dinner, a coward who wins every battle with his feet, a tongue twister, a cat after the cheese, a golden fish who sings in the baths, and a Latin song so clever that nobody laughs.
Lewis dreams up each song and prompts AI tools to shape and record it. Some of the songs have become games, shareware “uploaded” to The Sofa BBS in the story, under Bizarre on the home page. Which tool or person made each part of each game is in the Credits page’s table.