Double Zero

Well its the end of 2009, and the end of a decade. I don't really have anything profound to say, though, so I'll just say Happy New Year.

I'm going to try to put up another piece of The Pocketwatch by the end of this week, but every time I sit down to work on it I end up working on something else.

Low Fuel

It's Christmas, and I'm up late, writing for Skewed, finishing Act 2. Two and a half hours after I normally go to sleep, and I'm dead tired. I think it's finally time for bed.

Different Again

I stand here, ever watching
Watching in the forest of dreams
The life here, the trees here
They know me well
For me, they bring me songs
Songs of the sky
And the birds that travel its waves
Songs of the earth,
And the sprites that ever care for it
Songs of the flowers, of the plants
The songs of life.
But today, they have no songs for me
Because I had no stories for them
I came to them, warning them
And they will not listen
I am a fool, they think
A simple wanderer cannot know their ways
But they are wrong,
Because I know.
Because I can see
I have seen, and I will know
But they will not believe me
And when it is too late,
I will not be able to help.
So I will leave them
Leave them to their songs
A fool like me shouldn't bother them
I only know the future, that's all
I will carry their songs
Because I fear it is not long
Until only I can

Infinite Vision

I have a vision. A vision of a game made of entirely vector graphics. A game that will look as crisp at a resolution of 3840 x 2400 pixels as it does at 800 x 600, all with the exact same graphic resources. 

The only hindrance to my dream, however, appears to be the fact that I want to do it with C#. Because I cannot for the life of me get the Gtk# binding of librsvg to load an SVG file on Windows, and there don't seem to be any other SVG libraries for .NET/Mono. I managed to finally, under great duress, get it to not error out on me in Linux, but with Windows it just continues to crash with an undescriptive "Error creating SVG reader".

And as such, my vision is still un-visionable.

EDIT: Then again, it could simply be that my mind is avoiding the actual issue, which was sitting in front of me the whole time. Warning me about deprecated functions that weren't about to work in the first place. Maybe this will work...

More Meat, Less Filling

I had mentioned last month that I had gotten into a rut as I was approaching the last part of the Spiral Island script, because I wasn't sure how I wanted some things to play out. There were pretty much three parts to that problem. The first was a technical one, because a lot more of the later game script was moving into the battle engine, which I had only prototyped together in the past, well before I switched to the new scripting system. After I wrote that entry I decided to buckle down and finish writing the battle engine and integrate the scripting engine into it. It's working in a base format now, from start to finish of a battle complete with scripts for boss battles, but I still have a few things I have to implement before its completely done and I can create spells and stuff. The second part was more of a design one, which was more me having a hard time visualizing the remaining scenes and how I want them to flow. Since I'm doing graphics until later on it's not as an important point right now, but I have been using blank prototype maps for these things and I still need to go through and create all the ones needed for the final scenes.

The last point was a bit more problematic, though. It was a storyline point, and the problem was a few details in the plot just weren't quite fleshed out enough. Things just weren't adding up in the end, and it was something I had to rectify. In the mean time, I had been using the novelization document as sort of a scratchpad for fleshing out the details of the second half of the game, True Myth.  The writing quality of what I had written during most of that isn't up to the level of the beginning I wrote, so I will have to rewrite it again later, but from that I ended up solving my last problem, as I prototyped the ending of the book.  So now I have the plot holes solved, and once I make all the new blank maps I can finish scripting the first half of the game.