November

The obvious thing I did this month was make a game!

You can play it here, and you can see the development process play out in this forum thread.

October

Not the most productive month, but not the worst, either. I've been filling in optional dialogue responses. In theory these are infinite, as characters will respond to whatever you type in, but in practice I've come up with some likely topics and, of those, I've written about half the responses across all the characters. Progress!

But next month I'll be taking part in this, which probably won't be the best for my productivity on this project!

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...

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...

August

I've been busy updating my game in response to tester transcripts, which has made me feel a bit more confident about this project... at least until I ran face first into the limitations of the platform again...

It seems I may have reached the limit of what I can add to this thing, which hopefully is a good point to start wrapping it up.

July

Fellow denizens!

Well, it's beta testing time. While I wait for transcripts to come in, I've been working on a few supplemental materials.

I've also been chucking my thoughts on the survival horror games I've been playing on my Tumblr under this tag. I'll probably stick it somewhere else as well once I'm done.

And IFComp intents to enter are opening now, so I'd better get on that as well...

June

Greetings from Forsaken Edge!

I've worked through my "to do" list and all that's left is the hint system... which I am currently working on, honest, even though it's always my least favourite thing to do.

After that I need to do some testing by myself and then with any willing victims volunteers. And then I guess it's done. Do I want to enter it into IFComp? The timings might be lining up, I guess, but I also often feel conflicted between wanting to show my weird little things to people and wanting to hide in a cave and never be observed.

In other news, I'm considering making something for Neo-Twiny Jam 2024. And Scavengers Reign is on Netflix now, and if you don't watch it this weird little frog creature will find you and do psychic crimes at you (do NOT feed the weird little frog creature).

The Simuloid Affair: Infinite Possibilities

Last night I got sidetracked into making a joke game for the REALLY BAD IF Jam.

If you play it, please forgive me.

May

 How It's Going

When I'm making a text adventure I like to make these big "to do" grids in a spreadsheet. Everything that needs doing, in every location, and then just a sprawling list of general things to do. The green squares are done; the yellow squares don't apply to that location.

By this measure, what I'm working on is just shy of 90% complete. Of course, that final ten percent may actually be a bit more consequential than it seems - it includes things like adding a hint system, for example. And I have also just decided that I want to add an expanded end-game.

But I did recently run into some issues where it turned out I was bumping into limitations of the Z-machine (the classic text adventure engine this thing uses), so we'll have to see just how much more I can expand it...

What It's Being

 My idea for these games set in the same universe as Killing Machine Loves Slime Prince is that each one will borrow some mechanics from a genre of video game not usually associated with text adventures or interactive fiction. I kind of got a start on this in KMLSP, which evokes the spirit of a Metroidvania, even if it shies away from fully embracing the mechanics (see Trouble in Sector 471 for an example of someone going all the way with this concept).

This next instalment is following its genre a little more closely, it being one that's very close to my heart. It's a bit difficult to tell at this point exactly how diluted it is, and how much of an acquired taste...

I do also have a good idea what I'll be doing for the third game, but at this point it's counterproductive for me to start planning it out in any detail.

Where It's From

I've played almost every mainline Resident Evil game they've ever made. I've never played the original version of the first game, and I still have to get around to the recent remake of the fourth one, but that's still a whole swathe of the most influential franchise in a particular (sub?)genre of games.

What I've been doing lately is playing through some of the other survival horror games. Your Silent Hills; your Dino Crises; your Parasites Eve. Compared to the homogenised (streamlined?) triple-A games of today, there's some real character to the way these games are put together. I mean the mechanics, the structure, the controls... Attempts were made. Things succeed magnificently and fail gloriously. (I'm not pretending there aren't still games made in this mould: your Signalises; your Heartworms.)

I don't know why I'm mentioning this. No reason, I guess.

2024: I Have Plans

So at some point I decided that I wanted to release a few small parser games set in the same universe as Killing Machine Loves Slime Prince. Which I think will qualify as the first time I've ever done a sort-of sequel?!

It took me a while to get started, but I'm now quite a way into making a new game... And actually, I'm not sure exactly how small it really is any more. (A blurry, cropped version of the map is presented above...)

It's also my aim to post here about once a month, just with an update on how things are going.

See you at the Event Horizon, denizen!