I’m very, very proud to announce that yesterday, I finally finished scripting for Chivalry is Not Dead. This marks an approximately six-month development time, which is the shortest I’ve ever spent on a game containing more than one scene. Definitely a good pace at which to be working, given that I’ve got other things I need to be doing in the meantime.

Hence, to commemorate this momentous event, I’ve decided to unveil the official website for the game, complete with pretty screenshots. Give it a looksie.

Also, now that scripting is finished, it’s now time for the moment that many of you seem to be most excited for: beta testing! That’s right, once again, I’m going to need a handful of people to look over the game in its present incarnation and let me know what they like about it, what I can improve about it (within reason), and whether I’ve made any glaring mistakes. If this sounds like something you can do sometime before my projected release date of Saturday, October 13, send me an e-mail either using the contact form on this website or through “me at deirdrakiai dot com”. And, uh, be sure to tell me a little about yourself and what kind of computer you’ll be using, if I don’t know already.

Leopold McGinnis, author of Game Quest and friend of yours truly, has recently written a new novella called Bad Attitude. Being the huge Leopold fangirl I am, I bought a copy as soon as it was available (and was even congratulated on being the very first to do so), received it last Friday, and gobbled it up in two hours that very evening. It’s a freakin’ hilarious read, poking merciless fun at people who see success, money, and power as their reasons for being, and even has clever hand-drawn illustrations in it. Needless to say, I highly recommend reading it.

In unrelated news, I finished my summer game company job about two weeks ago, and am now back in school, both studying and working as a teaching assistant. It’s looking to be quite an eventful term, indeed. Hopefully, I’ll still be able to finish Chivalry in the process.

I finally got around to finishing The Longest Journey, a very popular classic adventure game from about eight years ago that people have been exhorting me to play for ages, because, y’know, it’s a storytelling marvel and stuff. Last month or so, I saw it bundled with a special-edition copy of Dreamfall in my local game shop, and thought that was just as good an excuse as any to get around to it. Here’s an amalgam of my thoughts:

At the beginning, I was far from impressed. Graphically, everything that was supposed to impress me back in 1999 has long ago started to show its age; unlike Grim Fandango, which was released a year previously, TLJ opted for making its 3D models look as real as was possible using the technology of the time, rather than designing its characters in an iconic fashion that served the dual purpose of masking current technological limitations. The cutscenes were nice, owing to Ragnar Tørnquist’s cinematography background, but then, I have a bit of a grudge against cinematic cutscenes in general, both because the player can’t interact with them and because they’re hard for little indies like myself to make.

But wait, there's more! »

For the three people reading this blog who paid attention to the fact that I’ve become Adventure Developers’s new feature editor, you may or may not have noticed that I’ve already begun using the site as a soapbox for my nefarious agenda. In other words, my first article is now up, and here’s what it proudly proclaims:

“When I discovered the wonderful world of amateur adventure game development, all I wanted to do was make a game that was just like Monkey Island.

“Well, okay, not just like Monkey Island. Unlike a number of people, I had no intention of writing a fan-made sequel or anything silly like that. From the start, I know I wanted to do something of my very own. Something original. But back then, I don’t think I was quite sure what that something was. All I knew was that I wanted to make a game that made me feel the same way as I did when I played Monkey Island.”

Come hither for more…