Welcome to 2024. We still haven’t defeated the Nazis, or climate change, or poverty. But 2024 is a nice even number, so… you know… that’s nice.

January has been an interesting one for progress. In some ways, a great step forward, but also somehow leaving a foot behind.

Being clever versus being dogged

My first obsession of 2024 was completing The Talos Principle 2. Puzzle games are relatively easy for progress - there’s what you’ve solved and what you’ve yet to solve. I managed to get to the end of the storyline and open up the darned gold doors, which were more puzzles. I solved all those and then it gave me even more puzzles. Large chunks of time were lost running around parts of the megastructure, trying to free the chained god. I mean, it was fun, but also incredibly dull.

When I was given access to even more puzzles, I lost all interest. I vaguely remember a similar thing for the first Talos Principle. Much of Talos Principle 2 — the environments, the story, the puzzles — lives in

an uncanny valley between being a generous game and a boring game. There’s just maybe too much, even though it is pleasant enough.

Maybe that’s it. It’s a pleasant game. It’s not exciting. It’s not hugely compelling. But it’s a pleasant way to spend some time.

I fell back into Shadows of Doubt, the game of being a detective in a procedural, living city. I had been playing it back in May, with a frankly ridiculous and broken character who could survive a fall from any height. I started a new game and never found that Sync upgrade. Since playing last year they added new content about cheaters and liars (in particular, doing the gumshoe thing of investigating infidelity). It’s still the same game with some of the same idiosyncrasies.

Early on in this run I found a Beauty upgrade that made people reasonably likely to accept a request from me. Which stops them slamming the door in your face when you just want to ask them their name. But I upgraded it to ludicrous levels. Now I wander the mean streets, asking everyone for their name, their fingerprints and a few bucks. And most people can’t refuse. I have caught four murderers by asking them if I can explore their apartment and just find all the relevant evidence.

This detective has much looser morals, and will occasionally charge a person a fee for being fed a red herring. If I turn up to someone’s house and it turns out to be the wrong person, I may just walk away with some of their possessions. This has gone wrong a few times and I’ve had to make a run for it.

Just recently I found the “fall from any height” upgrade. It is the return of the “just jump off a balcony” strategy for fleeing any trouble!

I have, however, been in a few penthouse apartments. I’m hatching a plan to steal stuff, throw a chair through a window and then leap down to the street below. The one downside to my thrilling and cheeky escapes is that the level streaming code does not like my shortcuts and I spend a little while letting it catch up. Better the streaming code than the angry wrongfully-accused!

Shadows of Doubt is fun and occasionally sparkles with creativity in how you solve problems. There is a lot of drudgework of shlepping across town to chase leads, but that’s perfectly diegetic.

Committing to a case

At the start of January I was thinking about my Anne of the Green Cables project. I needed to get a first cut of the plot. I got pretty close, but I have perhaps an input or two too many.

I have to introduce Anne in a way reminiscent of Green Gables, and I think I have some sort of scene for that. Gilbert Blythe should probably make an appearance, and I have ideas for him. Diana Barry I have some even better ideas. Too many more and I get swamped.

Since the idea is a mashup of Anne of the Green Gables and cyberpunk, the cyberpunk part demands a strong through-line. A plot from start to finish, preferably with an antagonist. Anne doesn’t really have a strong plot nor strong antagonists being more pastoral.

I’m trying to decide whether to present the story in traditional interactive fiction second-person point-of-view, or make something akin to reading an interactive version of Anne of the Green Gables, with a third-person omniscient perspective. I’m leaning on the latter, but it might be harder. I do feel like Twine is the best platform for this game, although I have a sneaky secret kicker that I’m exploring. Think Twine with augmentations.

At the end of the day, I’m still struggling to get all the different ideas together. I admit, I haven’t been as diligent as I was for Hand Me Down in taking and organizing notes.

While I’ve been wrestling with Green Cables, I’ve also dedicated a significant amount of time working on a game for my daughter. It’s a present for her birthday (I know, I’m trying to avoid the exact parallels with my game Hand Me Down).

Really, it’s me experimenting with writing a game in bevy, using Rust. This has been really successful so far, and I’ve managed to get things like particle effects and physics working. My main effort is a little sled game, where the idea is my daughter and son will jump on a sled and go down a procedurally generated mountain.

I also wanted to do a little platformer and a simple puzzle game. The latter since she obsessively steals my Vault attempts in FarmRPG, which is a mastermind-like game. Overall the game would be a choose-your-minigame experience that I could add to over time. I have provisionally given her a login on my machine, and this would be a nice thing as the centrepiece to her “own machine”. The deadline is later next month, so I need to get cracking on it.

I like writing in Rust and seeing cool effects on screen. It’s a different kind of joy than interactive fiction.

I also explored writing a ray tracer in Rust, because that’s an interesting project. Chris Biscardi on Youtube had a great video on converting the Raytracing in One Weekend to Rust.

But it’s too much at the moment. Life’s vibe is a little bumpy and busy at the moment, so a solid monastic dedication to something ultimately useless is a bad project. My expertise in 3d art would give me an advantage, though. Perhaps I can do it later in the year during some lazy leave.

I haven’t yet committed to a 3d printer, so there’s yet another creative thread (of ABS plastic) that is dangling nearby.

Let’s schedule some proper creative project planning in February. Okay, maybe more March.

Definitely before June.

Oh dear.

2024, we’ll have to sort something out.

Later this year I’m convinced I’ll move this newsletter to either Ghost or just my own website. Nazis and all that. It takes a bit of effort to move, but I think it shouldn’t be too messy for you, the reader. I should be able to just move things, or exist in two places for a transition period.