IFComp '23: MISSION ACCOMPLISHED
'nuff said.
Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.
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Okay if we are talking positive/neutral thingies… Well I have now managed to fix a problem which occured during testing at ClubFloyd yesterday. Basically the game got stuck in a loop and did not end.
Long story short: I somehow forgot to include an end the story somewhere in my code and the whole endgame logic related to that was bypassed :(. I do not know what came over me to decide there would be no need to actually end the story at some point… maybe I want my players to play forever 
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Comparatively speaking, the illustrations have taken a lot less work than the writing and coding for my IFComp entry. But since I can write and code and I can’t draw human figures at all, seeing the completed sketches coming in from the artist is so exciting compared to another pile of bug fixes! This is [EDIT: a lower-res version of] one of the feelies for the game: a page from the player character’s in-game sketchbook, showing all the possible suspects for the murder.
The other feelie will hopefully be finished tomorrow: a deck plan of the ship. Yes, I am in fact a fan of Return of the Obra Dinn.
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Daniel, if you want a pro opinion on the deck plan(s), I’m available.
Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.
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Had a bit of a disconcerting day, though it all worked out for the best in the end. I was later than usual, (from wrapping up a crying session, having on a whim chosen to wander deeper into the warren of halls in the old building, and catching a later bus because of the fluctuations in peak traffic hours) and wound up being in the right place at the right time- half a hour in either direction and things would have been radically different.
You don’t forget some sounds very easily. A stroller’s brake disengaging and the wheels scraping when it’s meant to be locked in place is, I think, any parent’s worst nightmare- doubly so with a large road and hard edged planter. I don’t think I’ve run that quickly in a very long time, since I sprinted across the street. The baby’s mom was there, but wasn’t paying attention to the stroller- she was busy ordering food, and the baby wasn’t distressed or making any strange noises to alert her.
The baby was fine- and honestly, was much more relaxed about the whole situation than anyone else involved, having been scooped up (disengaging chest buckles on seatbelts is relatively easy to do one handed when you have years of experience in wrangling squirmy babies) before the stroller crashed into the corner of the planter and slammed down, tray side to the ground.
I was pretty scared I was going to either drop the kid from my shaking hands or like, throw up inside of my mask (or on the baby!) and start choking, so I handed them off (no clue if it was a girl or a boy baby, I was so discombobulated- the adrenaline rush and side effects took what felt like forever to wear off, and time distorted bizarrely: slowing down enough to act and rushing past so that I hardly knew what had happened until it was over) to their mother and immediately left.
The jog back home helped bleed off some of the left over dregs, but it took quite a bit to sort of feel balanced again- a shower, lunch, water, and some relatively mindless but simple busywork (preparing my lab notebook for the rest of the semester.)
Today was an oddly serendipitous day. It started off kind of rough, but in the end, it all kind of worked out for the best? It’s still haunting me, thinking about what might have happened had I decided, to say- not follow the pretty uncharacteristic blind wander through the old building instead of squeezing in some work or diary writing time in the library, and been there too early or too late to the scene. That’s the sort of thinking that’ll drive you crazy, though, so I’m just going to have dinner and try to relax for the rest of the evening.
We get the data from the lab emailed to us tomorrow, so I’ll work on the graphs/calculations/assignment sheet then, and I need to wrap up an essay over the weekend that I’ve outlined and been chipping away at notes for, so it should be a somewhat productive, if boring weekend. Boring is good. Boring is great, it turns out.
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It’s my birthday today, which is really nice! It’s still early over here (many of you are still on the 29th, huh?), so nothing has happened yet. Just catching up on the usual while-I-was-sleeping chat.
IFComp, cut the slow burn and relieve me of the tension 
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Happy birthday!!
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I am back from my vacation to North Carolina, which is both a good and a bad thing, of course.
NC is AMAZING. It’s one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever been in the US. The weather was sunny and cloudy and cool. The mountains were lush and gorgeous. The white water rivers and babbling brooks and sparkling streams are like flies there. Fields of wildflowers everywhere. Tall forests with sunlight spangling through the canopy. An amazing lack of trash on the roadsides, and a weird absence of those places I call Crapville, USA, because they’re ugly and all the same and everywhere in this country. Instead, there are just charming little towns and bucolic fields and farms everywhere, all on these intensely winding, sharply curving, scarily switchbacking mountain roads under the trees that feel like forests in Grimm tales. There were places that you would think were locations in Hawaii or Costa Rica, because of 400-foot waterfalls cascading off rocky mountaintops surrounded by green and such.
Tom wants to move there. I kind of do, too. It felt oppressive to come back to 95 degree temperatures and drought and Crapville everywhere when the highest temperature the whole time we were in NC was 80, and it was so wet and lavishly green. But also, we were driving into our area of Texas at sunset and the sky was purple and gold and stretched out like a long sheet over the big, big horizon. And mountains don’t allow big skies or sunsets on the horizons. So.
And I’m back just in time to get back into my routine and play IFComp games, which is a truly excellent thing. I think I’ll review some of them this year again, but with no sense of fairness or objectivity in what I decide to play or review.
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Went with my family to Gardens by the Bay to watch the Mid-Autumn Festival decor and had a nice time. It’s been some time since I went out with my family. Took some good photos.
It’s pretty much the home stretch for IFComp, I’ve heard. All the best!
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AFAICT, also the Colorado is a beautiful place, fitting its name (in spanish means “colorful”), and, if I don’t have screwed again the political map of the western half of the lower 48 (an easy thing for an European, with all these straight lines…) is near Texas… ever visited that state ?
Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.
ps. strange as seems, I never mixed US BB, but I often mixed States…
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Today’s positive thing hasn’t happened yet, but I am sure it will be awesome!
I’m going to a concert with my father tonight. We both like Jazz, and we discovered the band we’re going to see together on a CD he randomly picked in the local library.
Aka Moon, a creative and original Jazz-trio from Brussels. They are known for experimenting with musical styles from all over the world. The first album of theirs I heard was Akasha, drawing inspiration from classical Indian music.
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I had the most delicious treat ever last night, it was sort of like a deconstructed s’more, which sounds incredibly pretentious, but hey, I’m not the one at the shops that billed it that way. Basically, it was a bunch of meringue, graham cracker powder, chocolate mousse, little chocolate shaving curls, and like, icing. So good.
I finished all of the work that I had intended to last night, but I woke up feeling like I got hit by a truck. I’m going to try to take it easier today… And remember to actually, y’know, eat food at a reasonable hour instead of waking up half startled from a fugue of picking away at evil, evil numbers and realizing all I had that day was half of a cup of coffee and my brain was fried after 7 and a halfish hours of working.
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My husband is from Colorado near the Rocky Mountains, and I’ve been there many times and love it there. It’s near-ish to Texas as states go; we can get to the Rockies in 2 long days of driving. It’s about as far as North Carolina, but the landscape is wildly different between the 2 states. The Rockies are a totally different ecosystem and look from the Blue Ridge Mountains.
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In geologic terms: The smokies, Blue Ridge, Appalachians are old mountains, smooth with lush vegetation and trees. The Rockies are young, mainly rocks and things that sting, pierce and bite (both the sparse vegetation and the critters).
I grew up in the east and definitely prefer it there. 
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The IFComp 2023 games are released and the fun can begin! 
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Been sick as a dog since yesterday (like can’t leave the bed bad), but now I can distract myself from the coughing by playing some of the IFComp entries!
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Life is old there, older than the trees…younger than the mountains, blowing like the breeze…
I’ve never really been to that part of the country, but there’s a branch of my family from West Virginia so I have heard that song many, many times.
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A bit sad to see that none of my favourite authors entered any games that catch my eye in IFComp, but I am pleased to see Onno’s entry in there! The storymode means it’s a parser I’ll actually be able to finish, so that’s nice. I’ll have to scrape together four more of interest if I want to vote, though! So scrolling through the listings again we go…
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I’ve been putting together some quick little mouse doodles for people’s review threads, so here’s them collected into one place!
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I like frogs. It sure would be awesome if I knew someone who could make frog art for my review thread, if I can ever find the time to play some games. If only there was someone. Hmm.
I’m working to be more passive-aggressive, since Tom says I’m just aggressive and it seems like I need to balance that out.
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