I'm still working out what I'm doing with this blog - should I give it a new coat of paint, replace it with something else, or just keep it chugging along like it is currently?
Either way, since it's here, I guess I'll post about my new parser game:
You can play it online here.
I posted about it in more detail on the intfiction forum and my tumblr.
And I commissioned the awesome art from nsjndd1.
The IFDB pages for Snowblind Aces and Six-Chamber Champion have now been updated with working links to play them online.
Still trying to get back into things, I've put together a Neocities page with (almost) all my games on it:
This has helped me realise that two of my older games, Snowblind Aces and Six-Chamber Champion, have fallen off the internet. I've submitted them both to the IF Archive, so hopefully we can rectify that in a little while...
If you liked my last post linking to something I wrote about a game from 2017... here's another one.
If you're interested in my in-depth thoughts on the narrator from a 2017 parser game, you can find them here.
I think if you keep waiting for things to calm down before doing what matters to you, you'll just die unhappy, because what is life if not an endless stream of things happening?
Still, right now I'd like it if things could just happen a little bit less, thank you very much. Among other pleasant events, since I last posted here, I finally caught COVID... Feeling better now though.
My little parser game is done, aside from bug hunting/fixing.
Those damnable things keep happening, but we still crawl slowly forward, don't we?
Oh, hello, I didn't see you there! Pull up a chair and I'll pour you a glass of Khamsin red wine or giant snail milk.
...
You're not thirsty, then? All the more for me.
So I've been struggling a bit for the past few years, but I'm trying to get back into the swing of Making Things, at least as much as the Universe will let me. What have I been trying to make? Well, there's a few things that are on the boil:
I'm excited to have submitted a piece to the zine Endure, My Heart: A Video Game Journey. It's a CYOA-style story with 40+ short passages and some very light inventory/note taking. There's one other choice-based piece being submitted, as well as some cool art and fun short stories.
The zine's being developed at a stress-free pace, but you might be able to find out more come (Northern Hemisphere) summer.
I've more or less finished a small parser game in Linus Åkesson's Dialog language. It's pretty weird and probably the least accessible interactive fiction I've made since Rogue of the Multiverse. I'll probably be trying to pass this in front of some other people soon-ish, although life keeps getting in the way.
As for Dialog: do I feel confident writing in it? No. Do I like that it makes small game files and doesn't insert extra linebreaks everywhere (unlike certain other IF languages)? Yeah, I would say so.
Throughout 2021 I worked on a text game of sorts in vanilla JavaScript. I completed the design and writing, but when the thing itself neared completion I decided that the basic mode of interaction was just not very good.
This project languished on my hard drive until this year, when I found myself looking at everything I did for it and feeling a bit sad about it. And then I got the idea to try reimplementing it in Ren'py. So far I have nothing to show for this, but once I get my parser game out of the door, I'm eager to get started.
Well, that's everything.
"Catch you on the flip side, dudemeisters."
