Server changes

Changes to hosting arrangements might make things skew whiff for the next few days.  Apologies for that.

Hopefully as name tables propagate, and the planets realign and the moon grows full and the cauldron bubbles and ... <cackle> ...

Afrika (and general) update

The question of what's happening has understandably come up, and I've been meaning to say something for a while. <g>  Afrika is still getting worked on, but my sparse spare time is split four ways at the moment, and only part of one of those four segments is spent on Afrika.

1. (The smallest of the four time segments) goes into playing other people's games & writing reviews.  I've enjoyed the writing a lot more than I thought I would, so I'll do this for a while longer:
http://wroteontheground.blogspot.com/

2. Playing & designing boardgames.  Currently in abeyance, this is a malady that periodically flares up and has an outlet here:
http://www.mikekreuzer.com/dtp.htm

3. Programming for fun and profit.  About half of my non work time gets spent on ... more work.  Odd job programming projects.  This should settle down into a more predictable pattern this year (I hope); cause it's the fluidity here has been a major source of the delays in segment #4, which is the topic at hand.

4. Programming for fun (and not much profit at all).  Time slice #3 has meant learning a lot of new useful stuff (Apache, XAML, C# and PHP being the most fun) and resurrecting some ancient memories (Perl <shudder>), and that's all given me time to step back and think about what I've been doing here in segment #4.

Segment #4 (AKA Afrika) started out as a humble C program -- ah, the memories -- but now, when I'm not forced to do something else by clients, I program pretty much exclusively in C# and XAML. So, some rewriting was always going to be in order.

While setting out to think about that I came to the realization that Afrika was really a number of different projects, not really just one at all.  So, rather than one big project that hoped to achieve everything, I've broken it down into a number of more sensibly sized tasks that I can build off one another.  I call the earlier state of affairs 'first game syndrome', and from what I've heard I'm pretty sure this also happens in book and movie making too. But I'm over it now (so over it).

So, my plans?  Don't expect anything soon (but you already knew that).

More details as things get to (and from) testers later this year, but the short answer to the question of what's happening is:
- there's more than one game, in fact there's a queue of them,
- Afrika's not the first game in the queue,
- I'm not going to hint at what the first game will be.  Not even a tiny smidgen of a clue.  Not till much later this year.

Christmas time is here again!

'Tis time to down tools for a week or three & get back in touch with my family & friends.  Merry Christmas to you all, see you in 2008!

Mike Kreuzer

Photos link

An old link from August that I wanted to point out & save. Some pictures I took at the Australian War Museum's Big Things in Store day are up at Picassa

New review blog

It's time to throw a few stones!  I've branched out into criticism, starting a new blog of computer game reviews:  Wrote on the Ground.  Enjoy.