Hello again! I truly have no idea how many people actually check this blog with any frequency, so anyone subscribed to the RSS feed: you’re very cool. So what have I been up to lately? Taking a look at my last post it looks like half a year’s gone by, and I suppose a fair bit has happened since then. Turns out I had the right idea on the whole Mastodon thing, so +1 point for Daniel, though it’s been nice seeing more curated and less toxic spaces develop out of the whole Twitter exodus. Also, since the big migration to Mastodon and other federated services, my BookWyrm instance has gotten an absolute surge of users! At the time of writing I am the fourth most populated instance with 215 users, and I feel like it’s gonna be a while before the growth rate levels back out. In my last post I also mentioned I was working on a WebXR experience that was going to have some fediverse incorporation through Immers Space. That’s definitely still planned, but I am absolutely terrible at working on my own projects consistently so I have yet to really get back to it. That does provide me a bit of a nice segue into my next topic though, which is a project I have been working on: Solitude.
Solitude is the name of the first game/experiment/weird interactive thing(?) in my shared universe of The Unseen City (more on that later). I initially started working on it with the goal of keeping it small and avoiding scope creep, but of course I knew it was gonna happen regardless. Over the past few months I’ve worked on it in fits and starts, but it’s only been recently that I think I’ve gotten a fairly solid idea of what I actually would like it to be and what I need to do to finish. I’m in the process of writing a script for the sole speaking role of the game, which I don’t anticipate to be too long. I don’t know that I’d call myself the greatest writer in the world but I’ve got plenty of folks I can run my dialogue by beforehand to make sure it’s not unbearably cringe or pretentious, so as long as I can clear that bar I’ll be satisfied. After that I’ll need to flesh out the main game mechanic for progressing the story, which I’ve tentatively decided will be sound-based, then it’s just a matter of a bit more environment design and then the music, which I’m really looking forward to working on. It’s been a while since I’ve done anything music-related and having my own game to finish is the perfect excuse to get back into it. Lots to do, lots to look forward to. I think when it’s done it’ll be pretty great.
As for IRL stuff, I recently had the chance to visit Lisbon for AWE XR and got to meet a bunch of WebXR devs! It was a pretty great time. I’d like to do something similar at some point on the east coast, but there’s probably a ton of planning that would need to go into that. Just something to keep in mind I guess. Anyway, that’s about all from me for now, talk to you all again hopefully in less than 6 months.