2016

Two years have gone by since my last interactive fiction full game release, Blackness. Blackness was written in 3 hours for Ectocomp, so it's rather short and there isn't a lot of attention paid to detail. There may be a chance of entering that competition or another short competition this year with another small game written in Inform7. While the Hugo IF authoring language has now became my favorite platform for authoring IF, I do miss some of the conveniences and quirks of I7 and never have gotten around to using the OSX version of it much.

However, I did manage to get a demo of DPRK released. It didn't get a lot of play-tests, but the few random ones I did hear reports back from on sounded very positive aside from a movement bug. Around Christmas of last year, I returned to the project to begin working on the final version of the game. With a lot of help from Roody (author of RoodyLib) I've started a "simulation lab" of sorts to start developing and testing encounter and combat systems. There is still a lot of work to be done, but I think the project is still promising and have a positive outlook to get the rest of the content and system coding done by the end of the year.

In other Hugo related-project news, Cyberganked is also coming up! Robb Sherwin has created a character using a picture of myself and I will be writing up some dialogue drafts soon for him to digest into the game, as well as doing some testing as needed. I'm really looking forward to the release of this game and to playing it. Anyone who enjoyed Wizardry and text games I think will as well. Roody has also been hard at work on RoodyLib for this past year.. which Cyberganked and DPRK both utilize. He's also been working on things such as handicap-friendly interfacing and other Hugo magic lately.
 
In 2015, I did manage to keep a group of 6 going for a table-top RPG going since December of 2014. As a listener of Burzum, I heard of a game that Varg Vikernes created called MYFAROG. I missed out out the first printing in Halloween of 2014, but managed to score a 2nd printing copy of the 1st addition shortly after that. We began as me playing the role of "MythMaster" (Dungeon Master) which was a fun practice returning to creating stories, characters, local areas, etc on the fly while keeping campaign solidarity. Most of the players eventually bought books, and one player took over the role of MythMaster long enough for another player to spend a few months in another country and for me to actually play as a PC.. an experience I haven't had in a very, very long time. I blogged about our game here if you are interested in how it began.

I also hope to get a refurbished monitor from Arcade Buffett soon in the mail to finally get my Neo-Geo MVS-2 arcade machine running again. I bought this cabinet (my first!) in January of 2015 at an auction for 425$ before fees and it worked fine aside from monitor issues. The main culprit of the issues was a crappy Kortek chassis. After a lot of de-soldering and soldering to replace all of the capacitors and the flyback transformer, I learned the hard way replacement flybacks are just not available for the crappy Kortek. So, I ordered a complete monitor as I plan on keeping this machine for years anyway and want something solid (and non-Kortek). I may buy a seperate chassis and yoke to rebuild another monitor with the leftover Zenith 25 inch tube.

The only major non-work or non-DPRK distraction I can see coming up? The new Doom game in May. If it's all it promises to be, expect to see more in the Id Software section of my website! I've still got a "Photon Doom" project I have on a backburner that may end up ported from Doom3 to that. I won't know until I play it. If it's not fitting to Photon, Doom3 BFG will be the target for a new Photon Doom mod. If anyone reading this is already planing a Photon mod for any game engine, please contact me. I'd be interested in sharing ideas and assets.