As I type this, a tiny, poorly placed cut on the pressing angle of my left pinkie protests – but I must silence it, as the people need to know the future that awaits them. It has been some time since I posted a holistic update of ongoing projects, and my patrons yearn for data. For metrics! Potentially forecasts, or even auspices, if the birds are cooperative.
Headline number the first: Protoplastic is on its way! A bit more slowly than expected, if the intervening weeks have left you wondering. The text is complete (I said that before and then went back to add half a dozen more pages just because, as offerings to the insatiable Moloch called “content”) and has been for some time, I’m just waiting for the cover art to be finished. I don’t mean to throw my artist under the idiomatic bus here: I have great faith in their ability to produce an excellent finished product and eagerly await showing it to you all. I’ll make a post with more information as soon as more information presents itself.
Headline number the second: my next project is a novel! Print media has been slowly dying since the day I was born and LLM slop now constitutes two-thirds of all e-books, but writing is my vocation and I will rage against the dying of the light. Serialized web fiction remains viable for the time being, so I’ve been researching that market, probably angling for release on Royal Road with early access to chapters through Patreon membership. The working title is “Deep Time”, and it’s a science-fantasy story about a cloned miner digging miles down into the earth for supernatural crystals that can reconfigure matter. I’ve got so many ideas and I’ll share them with you all next week.
Headline number the last one: in a divergence from the tabletop games I’ve been putting out for the last couple of years, Deep Time will come paired with a video game adaptation! It’s a love letter to Terraria, one of my favorite games of all time. Compared to that touchstone, I’m turning the dial down on combat somewhat that I can tap in to the pure flow state of excavation – I just really like digging to collect resources! It gives me a smooth-brained pleasure. So the pitch is, it’s a 2D sidescrolling mining game with a focused narrative experience: crunchier traversal mechanics, strong characterization, and cohesive worldbuilding. You should get a Fromsoft-style lore snippet with every block and item you pick up, and a protagonist that’s more than a blank slate. Learning a new engine (Godot) is a humbling experience, but I’m making a lot of progress.
For now, back to work.
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