As I haven't updated on this in over two months now, you might have thought I'd forgotten about it - but I haven't! My creativity for it seems to come in bursts, and while it's still a much larger project than I ever intended it to be, I've finally got down to planning out a definite list of collectable abilities. Even putting a cap on those is a large step in working towards something that's finishable.

The really exciting news is that I've secured a new graphics artist. He's the same one who worked with me on Special Agent a couple of years ago - the fact that everyone else who has offered to do the graphics for this game so far has gone into severe depression shortly after starting hasn't discouraged him at all! And as a result, Bernard has had an overhaul. I can't quite express how exciting it is to have something this much more animated compared to the original sprite - it really brings the game to life instantly.

On my end, a lot of work recently has gone into the planning side, which is sometimes dull but necessary. Previously, I had four separate things to update - my plan spreadsheet, Java solver, rules files and the game itself. This was naturally terrible. However, after getting an Excel parser working in Java the other day (which was triumphant until I remembered I use OpenOffice), I have the Java solver getting almost all its data from the plan spreadsheet itself. Now, if I can think of a way to get enemy drop rates read from an external file, I just need to write a similar parser to write out rules files from the spreadsheet as well.

In short, I must be mad. There are times when I wonder why Whitney married someone who does this kind of thing in his spare time.