March

My challenge this month is to keep working on my game until there's enough there that it might be worth showing to other people.

But my sense of how much work that will involve seems to change every time I look at it...

February

What was that I said about posting at the start of the month? Let's try again in March.

I promised to fill you in on what I'm up to. A detective game set at Forsaken Edge, yes, but can I give you more details?

Well, Game Maker's Toolkit has a nice video where he analyses different kinds of detective games. One of those is what he calls "contradiction-style" - you know, like Ace Attorney stuff. That's also the one he calls his least favourite, as you can just brute force them without understanding.

Anyway, that's the one I'm doing. 😊

The game is going to be a series of cases that you explore Castle of the Red Prince/Toby's Nose style. Meanwhile, the no-good NPCs are lying to you, until you can match the right piece of evidence to their dodgy statements.

The problem with all this is that I am the "What if you could talk to a creature?" person, not the air-tight logical plot person.

That's why I'm planning on getting beta testers involved as I complete each case, so that people can point out my own contradictions before they get too baked into the game. I may start some kind of developer thread on intfiction.org at some point to begin drumming up interest, but it feels like I have a way to go before I have anything worth showing yet. We'll see.

January

I need to get back to doing these closer to the beginning of the month!

I'll confess that the issues I ran into making a larger game in Dialog soured me on the language a bit, and I started making my latest project in Inform 7. But open source contributors have been plugging away at Dialog's quirks, and Inform 7 continues to annoy me by sprinkling newlines where you least expect it to. (The Z-machine is also just a more widely supported format than Glulx.)

So I took a couple of days to reimplement my project in Dialog and now I'm making progress in a system I'm much happier with...

Next month I'll update with a bit more about what I'm doing and how you may get a chance to help...

December

So that's almost it for 2024!

December has been a bit too busy for me with everyday life stuff, so I haven't made much progress on my new project. Probably the most interesting thing that happened with it is that there was a high profile, real-life murder that was uncomfortably similar to the first case I've planned out (for what is going to be a detective game). 😅

I mentioned a while back that I was working on a static choice piece for a zine. The zine unfortunately never completed, but I finally posted my work for it on an itch page. I'm not sure how well it stands on its own, but I felt bad just sitting on it...

And finally, as part of my prize for coming third in IFComp, I got this cool art of the two main characters.

See you next year, denizens!

November

Finally laying down the foundations of the next thing - another game in a different genre, using the Forsaken Edge setting.

I wrote one last thing about Forsaken Denizen here.

October and IFComp 2024

Forsaken Denizen placed 3rd out of 67 in IFComp 2024! That's an outstanding result for a very strong field of competitors...

I've thrown it up on Itch.io here and updated my Neocities page with all the relevant links.

I may have some more to say about this game - and the next one(!) - at some point, but as ever, I'll be pootling along at my own pace.

September

Welp, the IFComp 2024 games have been released and my latest work is one of them.

https://ifcomp.org/ballot#entry-2946

(Note that this link probably won't work after the competition is over.)

I have an itch.io page ready to go for it, but I'm going to hold off until after the judging period.

See you at the Event Horizon, denizen...