Geth and I are back in Newcastle after a few days spent at Mum and Dad’s holiday caravan in Dumfries and Galloway. It’s been lovely making the most of Geth’s summer leave to go zipping around visiting places for a few weeks, but I’m ready to settle down into the autumn routine at home now. I have lots of games to make (and play) and the final stages of a marathon training plan to complete.
Blog posts will gradually return to the normal schedule as a result!
So many photos from the last few days! This one is the view of Ailsa Craig from Girvan beach on Saturday. It was cloudy but atmospheric.
(Including the Tuesday pesto posts. From next week!)
After several weeks of game planning, I finally had time to get started on the coding for Game Next this last weekend. Life is fairly busy but I’m going to keep plugging away and try and get a bit done every day.
The first of what will probably be hundreds of boolean variables.
It’s nice to be back in the Adventuron editor again.
Still very busy with work so still on an enforced break from creative projects. Fingers crossed for some time to make stuff soon! I do have the beginnings of a very blurry snapshot of my next game though…
An important date in Game Next…
What happened on the 4th of July, 2002? I hope you’ll find out later this year…
It’s been another busy week at work and I’m really glad it’s the weekend. Geth and I are going to parkrun tomorrow morning! It’s finally back in England for the first time since that strange weekend in March 2020, and I’m very excited to return. Our home parkrun has a new name (formerly Newcastle, now Town Moor due to several other parkruns now existing in Newcastle) and a new course and a mostly-new core team running it, so it’s a bit of a new era all round. It feels very strange that we can finally parkrun again after so many false starts, but it feels like the right time. I hope Scotland and Wales aren’t too far behind.
Other than that I’m going to be chilling out with videogames this weekend, both creating and playing. I have returned to Final Fantasy I this week so I’ll be spending some time with that! I’ve also still got a lot of ParserComp entries to get through before the voting deadline next weekend, and I’m really excited to get some coding done as well.
The weather is still hot and not conducive to long runs. I’ve moved my long run day to Thursday, both because of events happening later in the training programme (to be precise, due to COVID-induced race lag, the rescheduled GNR falls precisely three weeks before the rescheduled-rescheduled London Marathon, and in a marathon training programme you’re supposed to do your 22-miler three weeks before marathon day, and I’m not doing an extra nine miles before or after the GNR! …so I’ll do it on the Thursday and have a gentle plod round the dodgily-rerouted ‘GNR’ three days later, no racing it) and because mental health wise I need FULL WEEKENDS at the moment that are not completely taken up with running, so it’s best to squeeze the long run in on a weekday instead. My last two long runs have ended up being cut short due to heatwave collapse, so next week I’m going to grit my teeth and attempt an out-and-back in the hope that, by the time I’m struggling, I’ll already be ‘on my way home’ and so it’ll be mentally easier.
Lots of groups and classes from pre-pandemic life now inviting me back, but as I’ve always said, these things will need to happen very gradually for me as I don’t want to jump straight back into Constantly Doing Stuff. Ignoring the FOMO and doing my own thing for a while longer.
My favourite tree in the garden. It looks great in the summer.
This week’s earworm playlists:
Saturday
Nobuo Uematsu – ‘Yuna’s Theme’ Crowded House – ‘Weather With You’ Don Henley – ‘Boys Of Summer’ Duran Duran – ‘Give It All Up’
Sunday
Nobuo Uematsu – ‘Cosmo Canyon’
Monday
Paul Weller – ‘You Do Something To Me’
Tuesday
Calvin Harris – ‘Summer’
And a bonus track Geth was humming that day:
Nobuo Uematsu – ‘To Zanarkand’
Wednesday
Therion – ‘Summer Night City’ Duran Duran – ‘To The Shore’
Thursday
Boston – ‘More Than A Feeling’ Levellers – ‘The Fear’ Duran Duran – ‘Shadows On Your Side’
After a couple of weeks off I’m excited to get back into game creation this week. I’ll be playing with various experimental stuff and also returning to my work on Marie.
Cecil doesn’t have a world to explore yet… but he will.
Part of the reason I’ve been doing my new ‘Screengrabs From Games That Don’t Exist’ series on Saturdays is that I have a ridiculous number of game ideas and not enough time to implement them. I’ve got a few pinned down for working on during the rest of the summer, but there are so many others that will have to stay in the parallel universe for now. One day!
This studio scene is just the shiny face of it! The real puzzles in the game are solved in the meteorology centre, where you consult with specialists, pore over projections and DO SCIENCE in your endless, fascinating quest to predict the British weather correctly.
No adventures in coding to report this week. I would like to have been playing with a few experimental games I want to make and working on my ongoing projects, but I’ve been snowed under with day job work and haven’t had the time or energy. Hoping for a light at the end of the tunnel by the end of the week!
I also need to switch this thing on tonight and check it’s still okay, as I haven’t had time to use it for a few months now. Maybe I’ll actually have chance to play games on it one of these days!
I had a really good time making Waiting for the Day Train once I let go of the hope that I could somehow finish Marie in time for the ParserComp deadline (having actually sat down and properly scheduled everything out, it will most definitely be going into one of the early 2022 competitions instead). I had fallen in love with the game idea when wandering around the beautiful vicinity of Causey Arch during Mum and Dad’s visit a few weeks ago, as I wanted to do a relaxing adventure accompanied by the photos I’d taken. In the end the adventure was not portrayed as relaxing – it’s a timed game, as the aim is to catch the last day train so that you can escape the night and its associated evil spirits forever… but there has to be some sense of danger in an adventure game!
I really loved making the two themes for the game (there’s a day theme, for the playable part of the game, and a night theme for parts of the framing story). I’ve had some very nice feedback about it so far, which has given me a few ideas for future updates.
It’s going to be a fun few months as I have a lot of game ideas to play with. Marie is still trucking along in the background as well, in a slightly more sedate way than she was doing before.
For a week or two, though, I’m taking it easy and carving out some time to play all the other ParserComp entries!
I’m taking a (possibly permanent) break from the Saturday ’80s Photo series, as I think the well is starting to dry up in terms of the family archive. Instead, over the next few weeks, I’ll be sharing screengrabs from games I wrote in a parallel universe… somewhere. Not promising that they’ll ever exist in this one (or conversely that they never will)…
