Writer, filmmaker, game designer
We are very pleased to announce that Commentarium.net, our new film & television website, is up and running. It’s going to be a great deal of fun – for more details about what kind of website we’re envisioning, you can read the first post, or you could skip straight ahead to our first article, Verena’s delightful review of Twilight: New Moon.
Enjoy, and spread the word! We’re counting on you.
If the last post sounded like I was depressed – well, I was. And I am seriously reconsidering some of my planned projects. As much as I love the idea of the internet as a space that promotes creative experiments… the reality of it unfortunately tends to be quite different. Too much is still about cliques, about getting into the right places, the right groups. And I’m too busy making stuff to play that game.
But I’m not quite giving up yet. With the help of some tech support people, we’re finally approaching one of our oldest dreams: making our own film review/analysis site. Verena and I have been talking about this almost as long as we’e known each other, and I think it has the potential to be tremendous fun. Of course, the internet is already full of film blogs, but maybe this one will find its audience. We may not be hip, but we’ve got an enthusiasm and love for the medium that a lot of hip people don’t have, so maybe that will mean something to our readers. I’ll let you know when the site is up and running.
There’s more coming. I’m in the process of updating and restructuring this website. I’ll be writing more about various topics that interest me, and less about my projects, except when there’s actual news. I’m also trying to submit some of my stories to a few places, so if anything gets accepted, you might get to read something of mine. The story I’m currently submitting to literary magazines is thematically related to the Museum of Broken Memories, so if you enjoyed that game, I think you will like it.
And of course there’s Phenomenon 32. What’s the status on that? The status is that on Thursday I have to go to the dentist because one of my wisdom teeth has decided to start digging its way out of my jaw and into some other teeth, and the release date of version 0.9 will depend on how long I will be in horrible pain afterwards. (Yes, I’m absolutely terrified of this. To make it more fun, this tooth is half-embedded in my jawbone, so they’ll have to break the tooth in two and then scratch the rest out of the bone. They say it’s as painful as it sounds.) I’m not sure whether the actual butchery operation is going to take place on Thursday, so we’ll see. But as soon as I’m up to it I’ll release a playable version of the game. This version will also include some adjustment to the ship’s movement to make it easier to control.
That’s it for today.
I’d been looking forward to the release of RPGcat for some time now – it really makes me smile, and I wanted to share it with people. I thought it had real potential to become a webseries that people would follow and enjoy.
The reality of it is quite different, though. A few people thought it was hilarious, but most people were just bored or disinterested, if not outright hostile. (So much for the gaming community, I suppose.) There’s no point in putting in this many hours into making more videos if this is the general reaction. Yes, the reaction to most of my work tends towards the extremes, but this is too much. Too few people are enjoying this and too many are hating it.
This makes me wonder quite severely about the future of this site and my online work. I want to do more than just design games, but frankly it looks like every time I try to do something else all I do is piss people off or bore them. I’ve often suspected there’s something about me that annoys people: some quality of smugness, or just something off that rubs people the wrong way. Maybe that’s the reason.
Right now Verena and I have several more web-related projects almost ready to go. Since we’re not exactly rich, the hosting and domain costs are a big deal to us, but we’ve been paying this money in the hope that the result would be something people would enjoy. If this is not the case, we will have to scale this stuff back quite a bit, and concentrate only on writing.
I’m not fishing for compliments here. I got a pretty clear picture of the reaction to the video. Just thinking out loud, really. Wondering about the shape of the future. (I thought it was prettier.)
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.
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…
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