STATUS: Friday, September 23rd

The Daily Report

Well, I’ve spent way more time this week on RealmLike than I had expected to, due to a confluence of two factors: some very promising nibbles of interest my first announcements received, and some interface-breaking/compatibility-impairing bugs with the BYOND engine that runs it that threatened to inhibit that interest. BYOND’s lead developer is very responsive, though, and has been working to clear up those bugs. The browser-embedded version of the game is already leaps and bounds better than it was, and I am confident it will soon be fully functional in every way.

Before we got to that point, I spent (wasted) a lot of times assuming that the bugs were just gaps in my own understanding and trying to fix them on my own. Having the bugs I report verified and fixed is doing a lot to restore my confidence in my programming skills, and the game is shaping up into something I’m proud of. There aren’t enough people playing at a time yet for the social aspects of a MUD to start to crop up, but it really does scratch the retro dungeon-crawler itch that occasionally causes me to fire up a DOS emulator so I can play Nethack or DND.exe.

Absent spending whole days wrestling with a thing that should work but isn’t, I expect the game to progress by leaps and bounds even with just a couple hours a day devoted to it. BYOND’s programming language is easy, I’ve made the game’s basic system fairly extensible. I already extended the Cleric, the third one of the four core classes out to level 5, leaving only the Wizard as a sort of skeletal outline to be filled in.

The dungeon itself gained a bunch of features to make it less of a non-descript maze; some doorways now have doors. Random debris can litter the hallways. Statues appear in certain places. Most of it is just set-dressing, but it does help you figure out when you’re going around in circles. Now there are landmarks. Along the same lines, each level of the dungeon has a randomly assigned brick color to help you tell them apart, and the dungeon is physically lighter in the region around the up exit and darker around the down one.

In non-RealmLike news: even with the setbacks of the previous weeks, Ligature Works is still on track to publish its first issue next Friday, September 30th. I’d like to make a post announcing our table of contents/contributors, once I’m back at my desktop and can make sure I’m getting everybody’s bylines exactly right. And my Word hack of making a document template that is more comfortable for me to write in is yielding interesting dividends, writing-wise. More on that later.

Financial Status

Mostly unchanged. My attempts earlier in the month to do some ad hoc “reminder I need money to live” crowdfunding went mostly nowhere, but I am sanguine. If RealmLike’s browser interface can be made fully functional, it could well become another ongoing revenue stream. Again, there have been only a few intrepid playtesters so far, but once the browser issues are resolved I think it will easily grow some legs.

The State of the Me

Physically pretty great. Mentally a little more absentminded than I like to be. Usually when I’m as forgetful as I have been the past few days, it corresponds to high levels of cognitive fog. I have been clearheaded, but scatterbrained.

Plans For Today

Well, I have a domain for RealmLike, so I’m in the process of setting up a blog there so I have a central place to post updates without flooding this one. I’m going to be doing Tales of MU, and probably that Ligature Works post.

Originally published at Blue Author Is About To Write.

Announcing Ligature Works Issue 1 Contributors!

Having burned through the backlog in correspondence, we are now pleased to announce our contributors for our first ever issue of Ligature Works. In particular order, we are thrilled to be able to offer original poetry and prose from:

• Mary Soon Lee, “Feng” (epic poetry fragment)
• EM Beck, “By The Hand Of The Witch” (fantasy)
• Ingrid Garcia, “Signs of Life” (poetic tryptich)
• Toby MacNutt, “The Way You Say Good-Night” (contemporary fantasy)
• Margarita Tenser, “The Second Law of Thermodynamics” (poem)
• Sheryl R. Hayes, “The Twisted Princess” (fantasy)

I have to say, while the logistics of our system were not the best (not that we expected them to be, our first time out), the actual process and the end results of our anonymous reading cannot be beat. With just six slots to fill for our inaugural issue, we managed to assemble a very wide-ranging collection of works by women and non-binary writers from different countries, backgrounds, and races.

We discovered as we closed out our slush pile that in the process of assembling this issue, we had rejected works by award-winning authors and poets and some dear friends and people whom we admire. The latter hurt a bit, but all in all, the results convinced me this was for the best. We picked the pieces that spoke to us and that most fit with what we’re trying to do here.

Interestingly, while we invited potential contributors to include any information about their experience or identity they felt would be relevant to our evaluation, very few chose to do so. I say this is “interesting” because I can only imagine the clamor from Certain Quarters over our emerging table of contents is that it must be some kind of affirmative action. But quality (both in the sense of “level of goodness” and “that particular characteristic we’re looking for”) stands out.

You will be able to read these pieces for free in our first issue when it goes live (projected: September 30th) at http://www.ligatureworks.com.

Originally published at Blue Author Is About To Write.