Congratulations!
You’re right. No matter what happens now, you have built and finished and published (within a few hours) a complete game.
That’s an achievement you can put in your breast-pocket and carry around with you for the rest of your life.
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Oh, good for you! I hope it doesn’t sound really patronizing to say I’m proud of you, but I am. I remember how proud I was of myself with my first game. I can’t wait to play it!
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You were one of the first people to welcome me to this forum, so it does mean a lot! Thank you!
HECK YES.
Just did some last-minute testing. Gonna take a nap before writing the how-to doc.
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Ended up withdrawing from SpringThing this year. I did promise the Goncharov girlies that if I did that, I’d enter IFComp, though, so there’s that. Most of the ideas I’ve had floating around (and pinned down haphazardly in Twine) are a bit too longform to have finished within the timeframe I set for myself, alongside some health issues- and I’d rather not submit a game that I’m not happy with.
Still looking forward to playing the games that do come out!
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I’ve been having lots of fun writing with Jinx in our Butterfly Court game, lately.
Also remembered to backup my Twine projects, (in all that futzing around for SpringThing, I learned a lot about fancy little formatting tricks, so I have 3 interfaces that’re ready to go when I finish writing them, or to repurpose chunks of elsewhere, and generally how to clunk around in Sugarcube much better, which was a goal I had since I’d normally worked in Harlowe. Working on being more mindful about commenting my code!) which comes out to about uh, 56 projects, or 1.1Mb.
Most of them are shorter snippets of code, dead projects, or testing pens for me to stab at various pieces of javascript and CSS to see what happens if I fuss around with changing the size of things, though, and not fully fledged writing bits.
These are the maps I’d been playing around with for the last while:
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Been having a ridiculous amount of fun writing with the Gonch Girls and our Butterfly Court game. It’s been a while since I was so productive writing-wise, and it’s always a blast going back and forth with Sophia in the additional spins on the main story.
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I submitted to the Spring Thing 
I wasn’t sure if I would manage to make it to the deadline (I had to cut a bunch of stuff, that I’ll keep for a post-comp release). I’m still not sure if it will work or people will like it. But I’ve solved my personal challenge!
It’s not completely new, not completely innovative, but I still did it
/Time for bed…
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I hope I don’t jinx it by saying this, but my lil kitty guy has gone two whole days without requiring a bio-cleanup. I don’t know if something went thunk in his head and he figured out that’s why he’s been in kitty jail but things have been a whole lot more pleasant not waking up to go treashah hunting for lil gifts.
I could be wrong and he’s just managed to find a really out of the way place and one day I’m going to move a chair and do a WHYYYYY! scream as the camera cranes up, but for now, it’s good!
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I was on a call with one tester, and my partner was testing next to me, and I was writing the tutorial guide while collecting and fixing bugs live. It’s been a very hectic couple of final hours to submission.
But I fixed what I could. It’s pretty well-sanded-down, but I’m certain some rough edges remain.
There was a lot of panic in the final 15 minutes, so I couldn’t get around to making a play-online version. Sorry to anyone who doesn’t like using interpreter! 
I really tried!
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Put it on on Borogove. Super easy, and then you can just link to your game page there for online play.
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It’s a TADS game; I think Borogove is Inform-only? (Unless I’m fundamentally misunderstanding something)
Oops! I have misunderstood something! It seems Borogove supports TADS games! Now I gotta figure out how this works, and how I can add it to my SpringThing submission… 
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Borogrove helped me get my SpringThing submission to work with online play last year. It was fairly intuitive if I am recalling correctly.
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Okay, I created an unlisted link for it on Borogove and emailed it to the organizers. Hopefully I did everything correctly…
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Joel is one of my favourite characters to write- I love playing villains because of the extremes you’re allowed to go to, but there’s something really pleasant about writing a character who is defined primarily by his kindness. The limitations imposed by their moral conduct can be interesting to toy within. It allows for the incorporation of a lot of little quirks and tie ins to other characters and their quirks too: like how Aurora doesn’t really have a noble title of her own, but he refers to her with ‘Mage’ as a courtesy acknowledging her affinity for elemental magic, rather than just by her last name when they’re in settings with other characters flashing around their status.
He has a pretty interesting position in the court, since he’s the Imperial Physician, tasked with safeguarding the Advisor’s son, as well as tending to the council in general, but he’s not very much like the others on or adjacent to the board. They’re generally nobility, whether old money (like Nicholas) or new money (like Andrey) whereas Joel was sponsored into one of the magical academies because of a natural inclination towards fire magic, and because his patron happened to have a son who could benefit from having an on demand healer (that would feel obligated to work overtime and on his whims because of feeling indebted due to said training and also Joel having a soft spot for helping others), Joel got the job. There’s other magicians who would be capable of the job- but not as many that Nicholas could manipulate as readily, or keep as loyal.
Unlike some other characters, Joel actually has to work and be good at his job, (I love you Andrey, but you are laughably bad at being a spymaster) or people die. Even if he’s exhausted, (and healing is exhausting, especially on the scale and frequency he does it) he doesn’t get the option to just take the day off- and he has to meticulously ration out his casting outside of his work obligations, which means even though he is a really talented magician, he can’t always help right away without at least trying to think things through. It makes it difficult for him to make friends, too- since he’s so entwined with the council, and yet not really able to mingle as readily with them: which is a part of why he really likes going to his silly bo billy little kitty church meetings so much. It’s both a reminder of where he came from, and a chance to feel normal, accepted: like everyone else before the eyes of his god.
Joel’s faith is a really central tenet to his character. It guides pretty much every element of his life, whether in accordance or opposition. He’s driven to be a ‘good person,’ and his major character arc revolves around what it means to be a ‘good person’ working within the confines of a cruel system, and what arises out of that cognitive dissonance: eventually, Joel finds that there is no way to be complicit in the imperial system and still be able to reconcile the image of himself as a good man, which pushes him to join the side of the revolution. It’s not easy- he definitely is conflicted about some of the more violent methodology used, and it’s bitter, for him to swallow the fact he has to turn his back on the people he feels he owes the life he does have to: that all of this time, he’s been played- especially by Nicholas. But it’s what he feels is the right thing to do- and even if the right thing is hard, it’s still worth doing.
He finds a lot of comfort in the scripture he’s memorized, in the little gestures that he’s long engrained into muscle memory- his faith is the bastion he turns to when he’s conflicted, or afraid: and it makes him a better healer, not because of it like, imbuing any magical bonuses in of itself or anything, but because it grounds him. The same way some of my other characters have found their faith in a cause, (like Henry, and the order of exorcists he belongs to), or in other people (like Joshua, whose love for his best friend and wife-for-tax-and-custody-reasons saves his life in a supernatural encounter), he finds his in organized religion. It’s foundational to him.
I find that really interesting to write about with Joel- because it’s not something I can really relate to these days, and goes against so many of the other explorations of religion in my work: typically homoerotic and heretical in equal measure. Railing against the establishment, as it were. But it’s the challenge inherent in trying to interpret scripture in a way that Joel might, as someone for who religion plays a pivotal, profound role in his sense of self and understanding of the world, that I find really interesting to chew on and mull over. It helps me probe a more nuanced, deeper understanding of his faith, even if it’s not one I’d adopt for myself. It certainly makes for writing I might not otherwise ever pen, and I like that.
Anyways, I love blathering on about my silly little blorbos, and I’m very happy that I’ve been able to pick up Joel and shake him around like a Barbie doll as of late with Jinx in our writing.
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Just realized that the drop date for SpringThing games will be on the day I have penned off in my week for therapy. A fun little treatie afterwards for me! :3
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I made a candle!
I have a wax warmer for aromatherapy and I’d been throwing out dead wax until my cousin got into candle making so I have been saving old wax in paper cups for her. I got a wick kit for $9 on amazon and over the weekend I methodically melted down about 8 chunks of wax and poured it in layers into a used candle jar (the plastic lid had convenient holes to place and hold the wicks upright!) and it came out a lot better than I expected! I thought it would be ugly and brown but you can actually see layers…like the seaside as if it were melted ice cream!
Scent-wise is going to be a bit of a grab-bag. I didn’t have any scented oil suitable for candles but each of those colors had a different scent. Since it was already mostly deactivated in the warmer I’m not expecting an aromatherapy miracle (there’s a mix of lemon pound cake, apple pie, aged cedar and teak, etc so that might not be the best!) but with just a little work I made a candle that I’d probably pay $10 for at a store, and I probably have enough wicks to make 10 more with the kit.
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And…I shampooed my living room carpet and cleaned the patio windows WHICH WERE FILTHY because I rarely open the curtains and they haven’t been wiped down since we were smoking indoors.
Spring Cleaning in progress…ding. 
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My local library is doing its bi-annual fundraising through a booksale… So of course I went and got myself some. 20 of them 
(won’t need to go get books at the library for a while)
They had a ton of pulp sci-fi and fantasy that no one was touching at the back. Like a whole shelf of Star Trek. And I found some old issues of Analog hidden in a box (they had quite a bit of them, but I just took 5…).
Hub was the one who told me about the event and proposed we go. It was a nice unprompted date
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If you’re keen to try any 90’s-era Star Wars novels, I recommend keeping an eye out for Timothy Zhan. As for Star Trek, Peter David is a solid choice. I say this, because many different authors touched both IPs and there can be quite some difference in style and approach from one author to another.
(You may very well know this and more, but I share this for any passerby’s benefit as well.)
[Eyeballs post #1000 coming soon!]
[Sees @manonamora and @DeusIrae scrambling for the privilege. Who will prevail!?]
[And @manonamora comes up victorious!!!]
[Crowd goes wild.]
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Im not much of a Trekkie (or Star Wars*) actually… It was just more of describing the state of what I scored
Which was a lot of pulpy books that will make me cringe hella hard (probavly)
*I got spoiled the first time I went to the movies with my folks. They brought me to see Episode 3 as my first one./
EDIT 2: I AM POST 1000 
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