No Winners Among Sisters

Credit: Tuan Cao (source)
Some rights reserved

I have a really uncanny knack for falling ill only at the weekend. I've spent the past couple of days shivering under a blanket - so no Sky Spiders today, I'm afraid. (I'm pretty sure it's not swine flu.)

I can, however, give you the results for EnvComp, as well as the judges' reviews. It does seem a bit unfair to be declared the winner of a competition whose only other entrant was its author's first game - and only written in a week to boot - so I think the real prize for me is that this event got me to write a little game that I'm rather pleased with.

I was only planning on releasing a post-competition version of Dead Like Ants in the case of significant bugs* or problems, and although I do have a fair few potential changes on my list, none of them are really critical. I think the game as it stands is small and self-contained. And also, at the moment I think that Snowblind Aces and Space Shot are far more obvious candidates for an update.

But some time soon(er or later) I may post a few of the copious notes and diary entries that hammered out the game's design.

*This is not a pun, since there are no bugs, taxonomically speaking, in Dead Like Ants.

Dead Like Ants: Make Rocket Go Now

For EnvComp, the IF environment competition...


Dead Like Ants
An IF fairy tale, of sorts.

Dead Like Ants is a low-fi, fairy tale-ish game for an Interactive Fiction (i.e. text game) environment competition. Explore your surroundings, meet strange new people, try to stand-out from your thousands of identical sisters... And perhaps at the end of it all, you'll grow some wings.


-Download Dead Like Ants as a .t3 file [mirror] [random mirror] (350kb)
-Download Dead Like Ants as a windows executable (1Mb)
-A download page for both competition entries can be found here.

--INSTRUCTIONS--

-If you have Windows, you may prefer to download the zipped executable. Just click the link above, unzip the download and double click the application.

-Alternatively, if you're a seasoned IF player, or you're using Linux or a Mac, download the .t3 version. Unzip the file and run it with an interpreter from this page.

-(You might also like to play the competition's only other entry. To my chagrin, this other game seems to be rather good, but you'll need to run it with a Z code interpreter. Before you get too confused, note that some interpreters can run both games. Try Gargoyle for Windows, or Spatterlight for Mac.)

--WHAT THEY SAID--

You can find the official EnvComp reviews here, as well as reviews and mentions from SPAG, Baf's Guide, Gnome's Lair, Auntie Pixelante, TIGSource and Jay Is Games.

Click here to read all my blog posts on Dead Like Ants.

Almost

My latest game is almost out the door. Since I've entered it in a competition, I'll let the competition organiser release it first before I post it here.

Quarter Life Crisis?

I guess I'm kind of dissatisfied at the moment. I'm not sleeping very well and I'm getting stressed and upset over even little things. It doesn't help that all my creative projects are up in the air. I just want to get shot of what I'm working on and start something new - but for now I'm stuck fixing little niggles as they become apparent, lacking the time or energy to fix the deeper flaws.

February is a Short Month

It's taken me a good week to add the finishing touches to my competition game, leaving me with about three weeks for external testing. It does kind of bother me that there are more judges on the panel than the number of testers I'm probably going to get, but hopefully this thing's simple enough to be pretty solid.

Barring any major developments or disasters, this'll be my last post on this project until it's released to the public.

>down tools

Okay, this thing is at that first stage 'done' that you get with IF games. I've only played the minimal path from start to finish to check that it works in the most basic way.

Over the next few days there's some mild embellishment, spell-checking and proof-reading to do. Then, if you're on my regular rotation of testers, expect me to hit you up with an email at some point over the next month.

Today is the Day

So today is the day that I don't do anything until I've finished my damn competition game.

Ticked off a bunch of small but menial tasks today. Kind of satisfying. Other than embellishment, there are now only three scenes left to implement - although I suppose that one of those is the ending...

Harsh Mistress

This thing is getting done. I've set myself the deadline of this weekend, leaving me precisely a month for testing before I need to submit it.

I can do it!

Probably.

Peeking

While I work on my own IF game, a few nuggets of IF news from the wider world:

Blue Lacuna is currently making waves. It's supposed to be expansive, nuanced and newbie-friendly. What little I've seen of it so far actually seems quite impressive.

And first round voting for the XYZZY Awards has begun. Here's hoping that Eric Eve's Nightfall gets some love.

Let's Get it Done!

Right, time to pull my finger out, so to speak, and finish this fucker. It's not a big game at all, probably half the sections are pretty much complete. A few days of hard work should be enough to finish it off. And then we get to testing...

Further Hints and Portents

Take the Fair Face of Woman, and Gently Suspending, With Butterflies, Flowers, and Jewels Attending, Thus Your Fairy is Made of Most Beautiful Things, a painting by Sophie Anderson around about the turn of the century before last. I bet she spent as long coming up with the title as creating the image.

Which is just my way of saying that I'm going to focus on my competition game this week. I want to start beta testing in February.

And no, you still don't know what it's about. Because it's not about fairies.

Probably.

Tra La La La La...

I've been hard at work these past couple of days, on my new competition game. (Also I've been playing Super Mario Galaxy and reading a book about the air war in 1918, but you don't need to know about that.) This little public domain painting, by William Blake, is what I'm going to use as the cover image.

As you can see, it doesn't really give you much of a clue what the hell I'm making. Or at least, it shouldn't, since there's no dancing about in circles. Although I suppose there might be.

So Anyway

Wednesday I got drunk off my face. Thursday I spent throwing up. Today I'm just starting to go down with a cold. But on the plus side it is now almost Christmas, and I have the next week off.

Among other things, I'm hoping to get a good way into my stack of unfinished games and books, and I'm also working on a small IF game for a certain competition. Only this is a different game and competition from the last time I said that. And I'm totally going to finish this one, honest.