For the first time in quite a while, I have several stories out on submission. If you have never sent stories out or submitted stories to a publisher, just sending the stories out means almost nothing.

The game I am working on uses an orthographic perspective… orthographic perspective is sort of an oxymoron. Maybe orthographic projection. Orthographic camera? It tries to look like an old game, and so, it uses old game graphics limitations.

You know that thing where people ask ‘what’s something that you could talk for an hour about without any preparation?’ I think I have two of those. One is old video games.

Recently I started combining all of my distributed experiments and gameplay tests for my game. That meant reorganizing a lot of the half baked scenes and projects that I have been working on into one unified project. Of course, that instantly broke everything. I have a slightly complex shader and viewport structure, and trying to combine that with other scenes that have things like basic menus, startup screens, pause menus, swapping levels, etc. caused all sorts of blank screen and screen size problems. Long story short, it broke my shader. The good news is that I made all of the shader and viewports setup. Since I was the one who made it, I was always going to be the one who had to fix it. So I did. It wasn’t easy, but I have now reworked the entire project so that I can run all of my menus and scenes in a really clean and efficient way. There is one main scene that runs all of the time and all of the child scenes either get loaded and unloaded, or set to visible, on the fly. All of my shaders and filters are on this main scene so that any popups menus or UI can run independent of the 3D portions of the game, but they get the appropriate filters applied. So yeah. game stuff is still happening and it’s still happening slowly.

Best Games - In Death ​ There is no shortage of VR archery games. I think it’s the controllers. While there are many options that VR controllers present to developers, grasping, waving, punching, pointing, lifting, pushing, pulling, VR controllers usually translate to some sort of gun. Or, if you prefer a different sort of shooting, you can use one hand to aim a bow and the other to draw back a string. The hardware just sort of lends itself to that sort of gameplay.

We are over halfway through the Winter Olympics and, yep, I’ve been watching a lot of them. Just like the summer games, It’s not so much that I want to watch my favorite sports, it’s that I like the variety. Just today I watched some hockey, some speed skating, some figure skating, mogul skiing, and the highlights of a curling match. I’ll only ever watch the highlights of a curling match. Curling is like baseball. I’ve played it, and I can appreciate what people love about it, but it ain’t my thing. It’s just a firehose of sports. I’m starting to hit the point where it’s wearing me out, but I still really love it. By the closing ceremonies I will have worked it out of my system and I can spend several months after virtually sports free. A hockey game and figure skating tomorrow though. Lets Go!

I just finished writing and editing another very short story and I am all out of words. The story writing will be slowing down after next week so I will probably be more interested in writing here again. Until then, I hope you have been enjoying these slightly more burnt out posts.

​ ​ This weekend was the Global Game Jam, and once again, I didn’t participate. I would like to, but I have been doing a writing jam instead. ​ As much as I enjoy getting together with people to bang out a goofy game, I also enjoy spending a bunch of time with myself arguing over what word to put where. The arguments are, again, with myself.

​ Since Christmas or so, I have been messing around with some old games. I say ‘messing around’ because I haven’t really been playing most of them. ​ These are games from the dos and early windows 95 days. The days of the first 3D accelerators. Games where you had to manually configure IRQ assignments. If you know what an IRQ is, you know what era of games I’m talking about. ​ Part of this is research. I like to mine old games for ideas and designs that might have been tried once or twice, but seem to have been abandoned in more recent games. Gameplay strategies, visual development, etc. etc. ​ Part of it is fun. I mean games are fun, and sometimes games that haven’t been played in years are still fun. ​ Another part is gauging nostalgia. Nostalgia is an awful thing. It can bring back good feelings, but it can also trick us into believing that the past was better than the present. I like to test that feeling. ​ I can tell you, most of the time, you can’t go back. ​ There are some amazing games from that era. True stand-outs that are still as fun as ever. They are good because they are good, not because they are of a certain vintage. ​ Most of the time though, these games do not hold up. Things you may have tolerated in the past because there just weren’t that many fast paced dos game, or games rendered in full 3D, just are not tolerable anymore. We have moved past them. ​ Part of me hoped that I would find a whole stack of new Best Games contenders among the early win95 games, but they are fairly thin on the ground in that era. That’s not to say that there are none. There are, and I will likely be writing about them in the future, but the past isn’t a treasure trove, it’s a painstaking excavation. ​ I will still keep playing old, weird games, because that’s the sort of guy I am, but it does make me appreciate the golden era of games we currently find ourselves in.

​ I’ve been working on a very short story all day and I’m mostly out of words. ​ I have been playing some weird old games though, so I might have some things to say about that next week, or soonish.

I finished writing a new flash story a few hours ago. I will probably have to go back over it and do some editing work before it’s ready to send anywhere, but this is one of the rare occasions that I don’t think I will be adding many words.

This is the first post for 2026. So what am I doing. Our oldest is back at university after the holidays, our youngest has been studying and getting ready for wrestling, and we have been wondering what we will do with ourselves when they are both out in the world doing things and we are at home alone.

This will be my last post for 2025. Does that mean I need to make some sort of resolution of the new year? A semi-hollow promise to myself? Nah. I’m more than happy to make plans. Here are some things I plan to do. I will write a few more stories, finish editing a few that I have on the go, and have at least a half dozen out for submission at any given time. I will finish up the gameplay loop of my game and try to get it out to a few people for playtesting. I will work on another game and hopefully that one will be ready to go by fall. I will do some work on yet another game, and attempt to get some very experimental visuals up and running in an engine I don’t have that much experience using. Mostly, I plan to enjoy my work, enjoy my family, and enjoy my life. And I plan to do all of that for as long as I possibly can. Check in with me around 2075 and I’ll let you know how that plan is going.

The saga of the nas is ongoing, but I think I have it pretty well in hand. It’s a bunch of drives that sits and chugs along in my basement, and once in a while I write some files to it. Pretty standard stuff, but it’s one more thing that I don’t have to worry about… until I eventually do have to worry about it. That’s future me’s problem.

VR is a strange beast. If you are into playing video games and you are looking for an immersive experience, you will probably want to try VR. There you will find the most immersive, transporting experiences. Games that will place you inside their world and press your own out to the margins. The best VR games make you feel like you are some place else.