Happy midwinter celebrations, Earth creatures!

I took a break from working on the game for a couple of weeks over Christmas, but earlier in the month I did some work on a chapter in which the hero braves the air ducts of Vorak's space dreadnought and must face a hunter-killer robot and a whirling fan of death.

Behold the face of Vorak!

This month I've finished rewriting the “Space Interceptors” chapter based on the design guidelines I talked about in last month's dev diary. There's still editing to do, but overall I think it's in pretty much the state that'll make it into the final game.

I've spent most of this month rewriting the Space Interceptors chapter based on design changes I decided to make after the playtest feedback. At the same time I've been writing up design guidelines for myself so I can consistently apply these design principles: things like the kinds of decisions the game lets you make and the kinds out outcomes they will have.

Thank you to everyone who playtested my first version and sent me feedback. This month I've taken a step back from the project to take in that feedback and generally to assess how it's going.

Attention, Earth creatures! I, Vorak the Master Brain, require experimental test subjects—I mean, playtesters—to refine my master plan for the conquest of Earth.

Attention, blog readers! The first phase of my master plan is almost complete!

Just a quick dev blog this month to say that I'm making progress on the game.

Foolish Earth Creatures is a duel between the hero and the villain, but they aren't the only people in the story. As I've been filling in my placeholder structure with first draft text this month I've been fleshing out some secondary characters.

As you probably know if you follow my dev diaries, I write my games in Twine, which is a system for making choice-based stories that run in a web browser. Twine has a visual editor where the story is represented with boxes linked by arrows.

But actually, I haven't used the Twine program itself for years. For all my games since They Will Not Return—including Beyond the Chiron Gate—I've used Tweego.