Since my last post I left my apartment, got married, left my job, got rid of most of my stuff, moved to a different country and across the continent, and started a new job. In a bit more than a week I'll be moving into my new apartment. I blame all of this on Grue who callously and fiendishly got me an interview for a pretty fantastic job in California. That's where I am now. It's a little weird.

So as you can imagine my free time has been a little curtailed. However, things are starting to calm down again and I am sick and tired of not doing things, so I've started working on Lichen again. I've also started using a reasonably neat tool to keep track of what I need to do and features I'd like to add.

In terms of actual accomplishment, I've fixed a rendering issue where holding space did not swap your mouse cursor properly (to the hand), and I've added a console. The console can be summoned by hitting F1 (Columns is currently unavailable) and you can type into it. It's not very fully featured yet but I'm working on making that better. It should, ideally, be something that you can drop into your own Verge games! Because you're making Verge games, right?

Right?

It's been a while.

There is stuff happening with Geas, but not as much as I would like, as per usual. Just like last time I posted, things have been crazy busy but now they look like maybe they're getting better. Just like last time. So we'll see. Anyway, this post is not about Geas.

It's about Hyacinth.

Hyacinth is an in-your-browser, old-school styled rogue-like. More-or-less. It has a much less punishing interface, and has some severe balancing issues. True to its roots, it's also still in development and somewhat unfinished. HOWEVER. In the spirit of "actually doing things" I decided to get it to a playable state rather than forever tweak twiddly bits that I'd like to add.

The game arose out of a need for me to learn Flex, last summer. It did that job and then lay dormant when things got busy, and I kept wishing I had the time to get back to it. A few months ago I finally got back to it, worked on it for a bit, and got busy again. In the last couple days I cleared up the worst outstanding bugs and now I am releasing it. Along the way, I got help, inspiration, and direction from my incalculably valuable colleagues, Gavin and Jesse, and far more playtesting than I could have hoped for from my lovely girlfriend tulokyn.

I'd greatly appreciate it if you could all give it a try. Just in case you miss all of the signs, "H" brings up help. Hopefully you'll figure things out from there.

And for those of you who usually shy away from rogue-likes because you happen to use a notebook with no keypad: we thought of you. You can use a 9-key "keypad" consisting of QWE, ASD, and ZXC. (The middle key, of course, is rest.) This, of course, throws a wrench in that experienced rogue-likers should take note of: drop is R, not D.

To celebrate the reopening and rechristening of my personal website, I've decided to talk about the project that is going to dominate the site, at least at first. Geas is an RPG video game, in the style of Chrono Trigger or one of the 2d Final Fantasy games.

In June of 2004, Geas was begun as a follow up to my moderately successful VERGE competition game, Journey to Black Mountain. It was to made in two weeks, and would be grand and pretty and all those wonderful things.

Time is not kind. I had built myself up to a futile task: I just couldn't make the game that I envisioned in two weeks while working a full time job and maintaining some semblance of a life. When the deadline passed and my mash of unfinished code and placeholder artwork managed to place basically last, I decided that I wouldn't let it all go to waste. I would build it, the way I really wanted to, and not worry about the constraints placed upon the game by a two-week deadline.

The story ballooned to something around six times its starting size. The number of characters tripled, and everything became more complicated. The world grew and developed in my mind. I started finding ways to make the game more intricate and deep. I worked on it feverishly for a while, but my energy waned. After several months I put out a pretty cool tech-demo but I basically stopped working on it directly after, and put my mind to other tasks that were less daunting.

Then came the 'Gruedorf' competition. I jokingly challenged another old VERGEr, McGrue, to a race to see who could finish their ridiculously complex game first. When he accepted, I didn't let the joke fall flat; I rose to the challenge. The agreement was that we would each update at least once a week or face Eternal Shame. This worked for several more months, during which I rewrote the core functionality of the game with the benefit of hindsight and a new, more reasonable scripting lanuguage (Lua).

More time passed and I left my job to start a new company. My free time dwindled to almost nothing. The domain I was using for my personal site (northknight.com) got re-purposed to host the website of the new business. Gruedorf updates, from me, became less common and then stopped altogether. I didn't stop thinking about Geas but its enormous size and my shrinking free time finally got the better of me and, once again, development stopped.

The other day, I caught myself thinking a lot about Geas and I am now grappling with some hard decisions. Some of these decisions, when made, will drastically change Geas away from its original (insane) vision, towards something more reasonable and more likely to be completed. I am still thinking on this, and that is why this post is a long rambling story instead of information about the game which, ostensibly, it is describing.

Once I have found my bearings again, I intend to rejoin the weekly fray of Gruedorf. For now, I am still biding my time until I discern the best course. The first step, reopening this site, is now done.