September

September 1998: Raccoon City is devastated by the T-virus. 27 years later, I gave myself the month off to replay the Resident Evil 2 remake. After a couple of more casual playthroughs, I sat down with my notebook to strategise and improve my standard difficulty rankings.

A nice little holiday! Now it's back to working on my project... Perhaps I should finally take a crack at that hint system?

 

 

August

Another bad month... I've ticked some more items off the to-do list, but also spent time on other things (such as signing up to a potential new IF competition based on the TV show Iron Chef) while generally not feeling up to much!

With IFComp imminent (and affecting the pool of possible testers), I'm now targeting the last few months of this year for my first test version of case one...

July

This hasn't been the best month, really! Too hot for a country with no air conditioning, for a start. Plus the next things on my to-do list have been a bit stickier.

And then more recently itch.io de-listing content, the intfiction forum going down (temporarily, but with no known timeline for restoration), the IF Archive blocking UK users because of the so-called Online Safety Act...

Anyway, since I can't post it in my dev thread on the forum, let's see a little example of the kind of things I do to make my own stories more interesting to me. One of those sticky bits on my to-do list? The character of "Dav", a scruffy man with some exposition to share:

I spent a lot of the month not wanting to do any work on Dav, even though he's the only character not implemented at all yet. The solution? Make him weird!

I happened to be reading a section in The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe where the main character is crossing an ocean, and some strange watery priests board her ship to bless the voyage. It reminded me that Killing Machine Loves Slime Prince includes a "Merperson Village" which has hitherto remained the only thing remotely like that in the setting. Until now!

With Dav as a merman, suddenly I'm a bit more inspired to write his dialogue: 

This process plays out a lot for me when I'm making stuff, which is why everything is often so weird in my games...

 

June

The throughline of case one is complete, but there's still plenty left to implement for it... Probably this is a good time to share an early prototype with someone and get some initial feedback, but I'm still trying to pluck up the courage.

In the meantime, I made a silly hypertext game that I'm disproportionately proud of.

May

Still toiling away working on the first case... and playing far too much Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. 😅

There's a couple of new posts on the development thread since my last post here, one of which links to this little lore page I made for the Forsaken Edge setting. I see worldbuilding for worldbuilding's sake as more of a vice than a virtue, but I need to be at least trying to keep things consistent, I guess.

April

Work on my project has slowed a bit in the past week while I recover from a wisdom tooth extraction...

Nevertheless, I've started a development thread on intfiction.org, which includes a few more details on what I'm doing.

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...