Keith Olbermann continues to be one of the few voices of reason in the world.
I am sick. Last night my fever reached 39.2°C, and today I still have a miserable headache and my stomach feels like it has melted.
Yes, the stress is catching up with me. I’m relaxed now, but all these weeks of working incessantly have taken their toll on my immune system. At least that’s what I’m guessing.
I will now drink my soup and try to get better.
A number of bugs have been reported in the version I uploaded. Some of them make sense and will be fixed by the new save/load system, while others are entirely insane. (Spawning in terrain? That shouldn’t be even remotely possible.) I’m wondering whether some of them aren’t simply due to Windows Vista – if so, there’s probably nothing I can do about those.
Anyway, I have to go to work soon, but I’ll have a (relaxed) look at these issues later today. I think we can expect version 0.9 to be released in a few days; if, that is, I can make a version that most people will be able to play. We’ll see.
Hi everyone,
First of all I’d like to say thanks for the many kind comments, emails, Facebook messages and so on. I appreciate your kindness and interest a great deal, and it’s made this situation a lot easier.
As a lot of people suggested, I took a day off. In fact I was going to work, but then I realized I was close to finishing Borderlands and decided to do that instead. It was fun. What an excellent game – but more about that another time.
I feel a little more relaxed than before. For a while, I was starting to behave as if every creative project of mine somehow depended on Phenomenon 32. But they don’t. Yes, I want the game out of the way before launching Commentarium.net, relaunching Bob the Spider (into space), editing my film or writing my book. But then, the game is finished; it’s not like I need to make levels or record more audio.
So what now? Well, today I did figure out a way of redoing the save system so it isn’t affected by the crashes (which I can’t fix). It’s not as simple as using Construct’s built-in system, but it can be done. And I will begin implementing it tomorrow. Then I’ll release the game – probably as version 0.9, as Evan suggested.
And then I will get back to telling stories and creating fun things. I hope that, in the end, the stories are what people enjoy about my work; and that those who enjoy my computer games will also enjoy the other stories I have to tell. There’s so much that’s been building up in the last year that I’d love to get out: short stories, podcasts, videos, essays…
Despite a hellish January, I hope 2010 will be a hugely creative year – for all of us.
I’m still not out of my nervous breakdown. In fact, my right hand has started twitching to the point where I can hardly type. Maybe I’ve been sitting at this computer trying to fix this game for too long.
There’s one more thing I could try. I could try replacing Construct’s save feature with one of my own (the game already partially does this). That won’t fix the crashing but I think it will keep the files from being corrupted. But then, I thought the crashing had gone back to being minimal, and now it crashes all the time. It hadn’t crashed on me in something like a week.
But I can’t do this now. I’m so sick of sitting at the computer and trying to make this thing work. I can’t tell you how sick of it I am.
I’m not going to burden you with further whining, though. I’ll see what I can do tomorrow. If it can be fixed, I guess I’ll release that version. If not, then it’s broken, and the last ten months were for nothing.
Seriously. I can only take so much.
Now the save files go bad when the game crashes. I test this game for weeks and months and it’s always OK, and now it starts doing this. Now. Now that I want to release it.
My every attempt to finish this game has resulted in problems popping up where before everything was fine. Even when I change nothing about how something works, it suddenly starts doing something it shouldn’t.
I’m tired of this. I’m a writer, not a programmer, and I’ve been struggling with code for weeks now, day after fucking day.
So I give up. There, the universe wins. No more Phenomenon 32, just a broken semi-game for people to laugh at, or maybe feel pity for. And no more games from me. I’m tried of fighting to get an idea out of my head and having to reinvent the wheel every five minutes to do it.
I tried. I tried very hard. I gave up pretty much everything else to make this game. But it can’t be done. It just can’t be done. I failed. Life wins, I lose.
If you’re curious about what the game would’ve been like, you can still download the version from the previous post.
This is not the official release – that’s a bit later today. But if you’re a dedicated fan who would like to play the game now and not in two hours… download it from here.
(If it’s not working, wait for the alternate mirrors. These pages are slow.)
Yes, I’m still uploading. It’s very hard to find places that can host a 240MB file, and most of them are quite slow. I’ll also upload the file to this website, but if too many people download it, it will cause problems – so I need mirrors.
If anyone has any good suggestions… most of the sites I was counting on are either dead or only take smaller files…
How to tell when the Trickster is telling you that you should leave the upload for the morning:
- Realize you’ve forgotten to put the extended credits in the manual.
- Open the manual file.
- Add a new page with the credits.
- Watch as OpenOffice crashes and loses everything you just wrote.
- Silently stare at the screen and wonder why OpenOffice should crash today of all days, when it has never ever crashed on you before.
- Understand the sign.
- Go to bed.
Not much longer, folks. I know it’s been a rough and annoying journey, but I finally have a file that I’m pretty confident has no major bugs and works as intended. I’ve spend nearly every day in the last few weeks working for something like 10 hours, so I hope you understand that all these delays were not the result of laziness. It’s just the lethal combination of a pre-1.0 game development kit and a game that is very complex and quite huge.
(I counted the levels today. There are 71 of them. Not bad, huh? Some are small and some are big, but there’s plenty to explore.)
Final game size is 265MB, by the way.
