The main reason I haven’t been blogging much this year (other than needing a small but necessary break after I decided to stop posting daily) has been that all my creative energies have been going into my game-making. I’ve had a prolific start to the year and have lots of exciting plans for the rest of 2023 too. However, I’m largely taking a break from it during April, because in both 2021 and 2022 I burnt myself out in the first half of the year and I don’t want that to happen again. I’m proud of what I’ve done so far this year and have been involved in some great jams and comps.
The year kicked off with the SeedComp Planting Round, where participants submitted seeds for other people to turn into games in a later round. I submitted the Adventuron demo Frozen Lake, which was later used as one of the seeds in KADW’s Twine game Cozy Simulation 2999. It’s really interesting to see what other people do with your ideas!
Next up was PunyJam #3. I hadn’t made a PunyInform game since PunyJam #2 in November 2021 and was really keen to get back into it! I made Lucid Night for this jam, which was based on a collection of dreamlike ideas I’d had combined with the jam theme of starting the game in an airlock. I’m still very much a beginner with Inform 6, but I really want to keep improving my knowledge of it via PunyInform (and have since made another Puny game – see below!).
A couple of days after the PunyJam deadline was the deadline for the SeedComp Sprouting Round (that was a mad week!). This round was for games made with the seeds from the first round, and I had chosen Rovarsson’s In a Tomb with a Donkey as the basis for my game. I originally planned to change the seed name for the eventual resulting game, but came to fall in love with the original and so In a Tomb with a Donkey it was. This was my first full Adventuron game of the year, but I’m certain it won’t be the last…
Most recently (in the last week) I submitted another PunyInform game, Marie Waits, to Spring Thing. Spring Thing is one of the biggest IF competitions in the calendar and I had been meaning to enter for a few years, but it never quite worked out until now. Marie Waits is a sequence of scenes towards the end of the story started in Pre-Marie, which I submitted to IntroComp 2020. I’ve been working on the main game (Marie) on and off for nearly three years now – I’m really hoping to release it sooner rather than later, though it might not be 2023!
So much more to come this year and so much I’m excited for. I’ll try to be a bit more punctual about posting releases (and possibly even dev musings) on the blog!