Back in action!

First week's progress:  Nadda!  Bleh!  It seemed like every time I sat down to work on it, actual work decided it wanted my attention.  I so look forward to the day I hit the lottery and don't have to work anymore. 

Second week:  Much better!  My co-author and I figured out a pretty good schedule for us to get together and work on the game.  Assuming nothing gets in the way (I'm look at you, Mr. Work!) we'll be working on it pretty steadily throughout the next few weeks.  After that we're going to see if it's working and change as needed. 

The plan is to continue with the reboot of the game but I'm not going to be switching over to anime-style drawn characters.  Like it or not, the style of images is part of what makes The Verse what it is and I can't change it.  I also considered ditching images all together and focus more on text, but again it just wouldn't feel the same.  Though thankfully I pretty much have most of the background pictures I'll need, (InsaneBrain ftw!) and hunting for the actual character images is much much easier. 

We pretty much threw away the coding I did before my "break".  Starting fresh is good, especially when my co-author is a much better programmer than I am.  I kid you not when I say something that took me about 250 lines of code, he did in 28 lines.  Twenty-fucking-eight lines.  A not so small part of me was crying when I saw that.  So what took me a little better than a month to do, I imagine will only take us about a week to catch up to.  That is of course assuming things don't get in the way.  Somehow my co-author thinks he's getting the better part of this deal.  "Learning" from me how to tell a better story.  Personally I think he's crazy or just trying to be nice.  I'm gunna go with the first. 

I also think I'm going to change a few of the gameplay mechanics since we're re-writing the engine.  Add things like carrying capacity, inventory space, ammunition limits, ect.  Give Kaylee magazine clips instead of letting her backpack carry 16 gazillion bullets.  The basic combat and stats will remain mostly the same as I don't want to change the feel of the game. 

All in all I'm excited to be back on the project and am really looking forward to how it turns out.  The one thing that really surprised me is how everyone who was helping me before is still willing to help me again, even after my disappearance.  Thank you :)

One year later

Ok so maybe not one whole year but pretty darn close and eleven and a half months just didn't have the same ring to it.  Longer post warning: Skip to end for summary. 

I have been MIA for quite some time now and for that I honestly am sorry.  About eight months ago I was in a bad car accident.  A drunk driver in his big pickup truck smashed into a cute little mini-coop I was in.  It was really bad.  Thankfully I survived (obviously) but I still haven't recovered fully.  It's difficult for me to type while using my right hand.  If I type for more than 20 minutes or so, my hand starts to hurt.  Considering The Verse is a text based game, I decided months ago to let the project go.

But even still I would occasionally check the blog and different websites it was linked from.  Even almost a year later people are checking for updates and sending me emails asking if I'm still working on it.  I hate goodbyes so I was really hoping ya'll would move onto the next big shiny thing but a lot of you just haven't.  I'm simply amazed that so many of you are still even thinking about my little game.  So yesterday I finally responded to one of those emails to ask one question: Why?

That "crazed fan" (his words, not mine!) managed to respond in such a way that just hit home in so many ways.  He reminded me about what I wanted this game to become and what it meant to me.  Hell I can remember a bunch of nights in that damned hospital bed thinking about my silly little game and how much I wished I had a stupid stimpack.  I survived a life-threatening crash and I was thinking about a stupid adult text adventure game.  How retarded does that make me?  So after I finished talking to that "crazed fan" I was determined to finish my game even if I have to do the whole damned thing left handed. 

That being said, I contacted another author who is going to be co-authoring The Verse with me.  Co-authoring is putting it mildly as he's most likely going to be the one physically writing most of it while I "direct" what happens.  He was actually the first fan I responded to since the accident as he was asking for my advice on his game.  He let me "alpha" test his game and I was very impressed with his work.  He's definitely a better writer than me and muuuuuuch better at programming than me.  I have very high hopes with us working together on this project. 

I will be making update posts here on our progress and I will make a set schedule for it.  I'm not sure if it will be weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly yet but there will be a schedule.  Once we have some more time to really review what we already have and what needs to be done, I'll make a post on our immediate game plan.

So to sum it up:  I'm working with a co-author and we are working on The Verse reboot.  I will make another post most likely within a week about our gameplan and exactly how things will progress.