Short update this week. The point-and-click adventure I made should be coming out next week. it’s just a little browser game that will take about 10 minutes to play through. So nothing life changing but I’m still proud of it and have the adventure game making bug so I’ll keep plugging away at short point-and-click adventure games in Adventure Game Studio. I have two weeks off at the end of December so maybe I’ll make progress on a previously started game, or maybe not since it’s the holidays. I guess we’ll see! Maybe I’ll just spend the entire time playing Myst Online, which received an update this month.

If I do any game dev, it would be that clay animation adventure game I mentioned before. I was putting stuff up on Cohost for it but I think that’s it. It’s another 10-15 minute long game. The design doc was already complete and I had done a couple rooms, so I don’t think it would actually be too difficult to complete. Then again, everyone says this about their game before adding on another year of development time.

It’s been a couple of weeks since I’ve done one of these but I’ve made good progress on stuff since then.

The adventure game I’ve been making for the library is almost done. All the playtesting went well and I just have a few final tweaks left for the final version. It will be good to move on from this. I had a great time making it and learned so much but also deadlines are tough for me, especially when they’re for projects in my spare time. That said, a big thing on my to-do list in life was to make a game in Adventure Game Studio and I actually fucking did it. I had it as a goal for this year and it seemed unlikely until the work came in early this fall so I feel incredibly fortunate to have something kick me in the butt and finally do it.

Now that I finally cleared the roadblock of learning AGS and will be putting a game out there very soon, there will be more tiny adventure games to come. I’m still not 100% sure what I’ll do next. I have a half finished clay animation adventure game sitting around and I should probably do that one. I don’t think it will take too long and it would be fun, so it’s likely to be that. I have ideas for what I can work on after that but we’ll see where the next few months lead me. I’m also working on doing more streaming on Twitch and posting the VODs to my YouTube. I was anti-streaming for a long time but I think it’s actually good for me to talk to folks while playing comforting games so I’ll keep doing it.

Pretty much all of November was a rough month for me mentally so that wasn’t fun. I’m past it all now and doing much better. Don’t really know if I could have done much to prevent it since it’s election/SAD season/increase of work but happy to be past it.

Well, lol, sorry that ended on a bit of a downer note but I’m through the rough part now and doing better. Really!

Alright, I think I’ve gotten back into the groove of posting on here after taking a break because of mental health reasons. Doing posts on here has actually helped with that so I guess I’ll keep it up.

Progress on the adventure game is going well. I think I’m “done” with my game in that it’s playable from start to finish and it’s basically all there. Now I get to just spend the next few weeks testing it for bugs and adding more jokes, and that seems nice. Overall this was a very good experience for me. I’ll finally have shipped a game in Adventure Game Studio, which I’ve wanted to do for at least a decade, and learned a lot in the process. Having a deadline made sure that happened. However, having a deadline is always a little bit stressful for me so I’ll probably take a couple of weeks off after it’s turned in so I can recover. I wouldn’t quite say I’m burnt out, but I think that if I jumped straight to another game I would be.

I’m looking forward to the break though, because I’m going to have a bit of time off in December and will be able to chill and also maybe stream some video games. Maybe some that I will cover in my GOTY awards on here! If you saw my previously grumpy post, I want to see more recognition of indie games, even ones that aren’t on Steam. I’m kinda of bitter about games only being seeing if they’re on there, so I have started putting together a GOTY list and also a For Your Consideration form. I only launched it an hour ago and I’m already discovering a lot of cool stuff I never knew about. I guess if you want to hear about cool things, just make a post saying “tell me about your art!” These won’t have any nominees listed, because that only pits people against each other. I would like to make certificates and send them to people, but depending on the volume of this, they may have to be digital or I’ll lose a lot of money. We’ll see. Not everyone will claim one so maybe it won’t be overwhelming.

I don’t remember if I posted about the other adventure game I was working on before I started work on the one I’ve been blogging about. It’s a sci-fi one made with stop motion animation using clay. I posted about it a few times on Cohost but I don’t know if I did anywhere else. I’d like to jump to that next after I take a short break. It already had a good amount of work done and should cruise along pretty quickly now that I know AGS pretty well. There’s also a stop motion FPS I had started work on and may jump to after that, even if it’s just a very tiny game. I had a lot of fun working on that too. The design doc was already done and so was a lot of the artwork. I have a stack of games I’d like to make but won’t talk about them until I start development on each one or else I don’t think it will happen.

Well, that’s it for this week. Hope you’re doing well!

Well, it’s been a while since I’ve done one of these. I’ve mentioned previously on here that things were quiet because of stress from everything in the world so I won’t go into that here. I just learned that I can actually talk about the point-and-click adventure I’ve been working on though, so lets focus on that instead.

I am making a free point-and-click adventure called Dr. Chase’s Adventure for the Ann Arbor District Library. It is for the city’s bicentennial and is part of a mini anthology along with two other games. I am so happy I got to help organize this project and I’m very proud of this game. Dr. Chase is a local Ann Arbor figure who is kinda sorta the Dr. Oz of his time, meaning a “doctor” who is also a scam artist. He was an incredibly weird guy who found success selling his book of recipes until he had the feeling he was going to die soon and sold everything, including his printing press. It turns out he was completely fine and tried to make a comeback and failed. My game is more focused on the beginning of his journey and is about how he’s trying to help a patient with her in-grown toenail, and the game will use his real recipes as puzzle solutions. You can read more about the man here and his recipe book here. Here’s a very short video of the game:

I believe the game should be coming out in December. I’ve learned so much from doing this project and it should mean you’ll see more adventure games from me in the future. I may or may not have mentioned that I’ve been working on an adventure game using clay on here, I definitely did on social media, but that should move pretty quickly once this game is shipped since I now know how to use Adventure Game Studio. The game itself is already designed and the art for a few rooms has been completed as well, so I’m hoping it won’t take too long for that one to ship either.

In addition to these two games, I’m hoping to compile all my indie game roundups for 2003 in a format that’s much more readable. This will be a free PDF. I just think it would be a fun thing to have on Itch and maybe bring more attention on games I enjoyed playing that year.

I also liked writing a review of Deja Vu yesterday so expect more games reviews to pop up on here. I have a ton of reviews of FMV games from a book I thought about writing, but I may as well just put them on here and I can always compile them later like the Digital Antiquarian or whatever. I also want to move reviews from Backloggd to here because I don’t enjoy using that site and want it someone more permanent anyway. It’s also just nice to compile my thoughts on a thing after playing it.

Finally, the last thing I want to post here are the remaining pictures from the CompStoreVisuals account on Cohost before that permanently shuts down. It’s all on Mastodon too but again, I want it all on something more permanent.

I should have just called these devlogs because that’s what they are. Ah well. It’s been a fairly productive week for me. I’m feeling a little under the weather, although not nearly as bad as I thought this morning when I just drank some coffee and realized my migraine was coming from cutting down on caffeine too quickly. Oops.

If you’ve sent me info about the Cohost spreadsheet or buttons to add to my page, apologies for the delay. Between that and just being really busy, I haven’t had time getting around to it. But that’s something I’m hoping to fix later this week

Work on the adventure game continues. I don’t think I can’t really show anything yet since it’s a contract project, apologies, but I’m happy with how quickly I’m making progress. I think all the backgrounds are 90% done, with some tweaking in the art still to be done, so once I plug them all into Adventure Game Studio and having everything mapped out, I should be able to navigate through the entire game. I know “I just need to build the whole game and it’s done” sounds ridiculous but importing art into AGS isn’t too bad so I’m excited. I was getting kind of tired of doing art, and the room art is the biggest chunk of art required for the game, so I’m excited to get this stuff implemented so it will feel more like a real game.

I believe I have most of the character art done too, so I just need to do the one or two people left, inventory, and GUI and I should be all set there? That’s kinda nice. Obviously there’s still a lot of iterative work to be done, but I have the basic game design and puzzles done too, so I can kinda just have fun writing jokes for the next two months.

Another good thing about this project is that it will help me get a lot better at Adventure Game Studio so I will be able to do more complex things in the future. WilcoWeb has been working on a framework for AGS that will help in creation of doing games inspired by Sierra’s Manhunter franchise, which is something I’ve wanted to do for a long time, so maybe that will be my next project. Then again, I was working on clay games and should work on those more too. Or combine the two. I’m so bad at focusing on one thing at a time.

Here’s my weekly check in on what I’ve been up to. So far this week has been less bananas than the last couple of weeks, which has been nice, and I’m finally settling into a groove with the kids back in school.

Cohost shut down yesterday and is now read only for the next few months before going down completely. I keep saying I’ll do The Post about the site at some point but hopefully I do make time for that, even if everyone else has already done it and better. It certainly wasn’t perfect but I did like going there and will miss it. I’ve been working on a gigantic blog roll so if you did post there and want your site added, let me know in the comments or social media. Having a giant list of sites to follow in my RSS feed reader has been nice.

Work on the adventure game continues. I’ve made a couple rooms and a character since last week so I’m feeling pretty good about progress. The design of the game’s puzzles is improving too. In theory it’s probably much better and more efficient to design the entire game before doing art for it but I just cannot function like that and it has killed previous projects so I’m sticking with what works for me. But at this rate I feel pretty comfortable about hitting the deadline. Getting better at Adventure Game Studio may be a potential hurdle but people have been very kind about answering my questions about the engine.

The Wall of Buttons continues to grow. It’s been fun doing goofy early internet stuff and then clicking around on other websites.

Busy week here! After a rough start with the kids getting a cold at the beginning of the week, I’ve actually got a lot done.

The big thing I’ve been annoying about on social media this week is my wall of buttons that link to other pages. People from Cohost have been getting really into having button links since the site shuts down in less than a week and everyone is getting into personal pages since we want to continue long posting but not go to Tumblr, which I had deleted after they got into AI scraping and their CEO has repeatedly screwed up in a variety of ways. It’s been a lot of fun adding them and I encourage everyone to make a button for their site and let me know about it so I can include it.

The other exciting thing, which I can’t really say much about yet, is that Mystery Project is really taking off this week and I’m learning everything I can about Adventure Game Studio so I can make a game in that. I have also started working on art for it. It should be revealed in 2-3 months and is actually a very tiny project, but exciting to me.

Last week I did a check-in post and here I am, doing another one. Here’s what’s going on in my life:

• I mentioned last week that I paused all my game dev projects because of potential contract game dev work coming up and good news, it’s here! I can’t talk about it yet but I am cramming as much GB Studio knowledge as possible and it’s very exciting. It’s not a big project at all but I think it will be fun.
• This weekend I got to volunteer with Friends of the Rouge to replace a bunch of boring grass near me with a rain garden that will be good for pollinators and reduce runoff. It was a great experience but the workout kicked my butt and I’m finally healing from that. But if you’re feeling down about the world, go volunteer at a thing! It helped me a lot anyway.
• I’m going to attempt to listen to my entire record collection and my previous blog post is about that.

So sort of a busy week but at the same time, not a lot to talk about either. But I’m doing well and excited to work on things I can’t talk about for a few months! Here’s photos of the rain garden in Plymouth.

One of my favorite things about following personal blogs is just the regular check ins people do where they write about what has been happening. When Craig Maloney was with us, I enjoyed reading his regular check in posts and thought it would be fun to start writing them since this is my personal site and not a games blog, but it might also keep me accountable on projects I’m working on. But I’ll write about other things I’ve been watching/reading/playing and whatever else I’m up to. These might be on a weekly basis.

• Speaking of projects, this is going to sound silly since I just said this is where I’ll blog about them, but I actually just put them all on hold for the moment. I might be getting some contract work soon and don’t want to get too invested in anything before I have to switch gears. I don’t really mind since I should be taking more time for myself to relax anyway. I’m pretty busy anyway since my kids just started school again and it takes a minute to get to the rhythm of that. There’s also just been a lot of other stress lately with things like the basement flooding and recovering from all of that, so it’s fine for me to just chill.
• There’s also been the sadness of Cohost shutting down soon. I’m not really surprised about it but it’s still sad. I should probably do a larger post about that sometime since I feel like it deserves it. In the meantime, I started putting together a massive sheet of personal sites that users there have, as one of the possibly life rafts I guess? I’m going to try to make a blogroll or post with as many links as possible to other cohost folks with blogs/sites before the site shuts down posting. I’ve got some but if you’re reading this, were a user at Cohost, and want your site added, let me know! It’s definitely still a work in progress, I need to go through all the blog related tags and people I’m following, but if you want to see the current state, here you go: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1BCJ7PFpUEjaysOA4C77z9Ckdo0YbutPihTh7oimm2AA/edit?usp=sharing
• It’s definitely not a replacement for Cohost or the future of the internet, but it is nice having more people to follow on the RSS feed reader and I think all the talk about having sites on Cohost has inspired more people to blog or start something.
• Last night’s debate went better than expected, hooray!
• I’ve been playing some random adventure games with the kids and they’re really into them. I always worried I’m trying to push anything on them, but they’ve been very excited to play Sam & Max and Frog Detective 2.
• I also finally started playing Gubble 2 and it’s not as good as the first. I should probably do some full posts about Gubble at some point, since I don’t think my streams of that have been mentioned here.