Sunday, December 29, 2013

Merry Christmas... and a minor update to AIF Toolkit

I hope everyone has had a wonderful Christmas. I have a teensy Christmas gift: AIF toolkit version 4.6. It includes some bug fixes and add a minor new feature. You can now force-strip characters so that their clothes go off-stage.

Anyways. Happy new year.

Download it here.

Saturday, December 21, 2013

Where Have I Been?

So, it's been a bit of time since I posted here. It's what you might have expected it to be: life, work and sheer laziness. But there is another thing that's ultimately been slowing me down, something that I'll talk about here.

A year or so back I was a volunteer editor for Literotica. I had always been good at the minutiae of grammar and spelling, and I had previously worked professionally as an editor, so I thought: why not, I'll give it a go. I started editing stories and, to my shock, people were actually enthusiastic about my work.

So, after not having edited for a while, I've decided to try and edit professionally again, ideally for people who want to be self-published. To build my reputation, I've taken on a lot of authors, of all skill levels, and that's been eating my time like nothing else. I've stolen a moment here and there to work on my game, but progress has really slowed down.

One of the stipulations to my writers was that I could link to their work as samples of my editing, so I will be occasionally be posting them on this blog.

A few games have been released recently, and I will be posting some reviews soon.

Wednesday, December 4, 2013

An Update

It's been a while since I gave an update. Well, here's one.

Soccer Story a little less than 100,000 words long now. For some perspective, that's about as long as your standard novel. It's a bit hard to estimate since much of the writing has been moved over to a word document, but the important thing is that it isn't even close to feeling polished, done, or even at a working state. I've slowed down development on it to gather my thoughts about the project. I'm dissatisfied with the simulation aspect in a couple of ways. While it is sophisticated as far as a text project goes, it's feels quite *random*, and I'm really not sure what to do about it right now.

More recently, I have been working on a demo game for Simpler AIF. I won't be releasing much info about it, except that it is in a genre I have little experience in, so it's an experiment. I am, however, planning on doing my own hand-drawn art for it, contingent on whether I'm still able to produce anything worthwhile. There was actually a time I was an okay artist, but it was by intuition and practice rather than training, and it has suffered unused for a while. My skill at art has always been correlated with my boredom at the time and, since graduating from university and entering jobs that would fire me for doodling, I've hardly laid a pen to paper. That must change.

If I do manage to draw something that doesn't look like a graphite turd, I will post a teaser here.