Well, the Demakes competition is over. Thanks to the people who voted for my unfinished game. :-P
During the voting period, I was reluctant to mention publicly just how little fun I had finishing the demo for Freefall Brass in time for the deadline - in particular, most of the plot and writing was the product of my last few hours of stressful slaving over the keyboard.
If I do keep working on Freefall Brass, I'll probably be giving the whole thing a bit of an overhaul. My first brush at a jazzed-up combat screen appears above. Obviously, it doesn't gel very well with the rest of the game, so that'd need sprucing up too.
The plot, as it stands, would also need a thorough rethink. I did my best with the time I had, but my chief concern was coming up with an interesting beginning, and I don't think I came up with something that would provide lasting interest. At least, not lasting interest to me and I'm the guy who'd have to work on it.
In any case, I'm planning on entering a short IF game in the mooted TIGSource Halloween competition, and then I'm going to focus on a project entirely of my own devising. That means I'm giving myself about a couple of weeks to work on Freefall Brass. On the one hand, I look at how much work I've done on it so far, and I think it'd be a shame to not at least stick some interesting prose into the scaffold I've made. And on the other hand I look at the amount of work left until I'd be happy with it, and I think I'd much rather be doing something else...