It's summer and I've been doing a lot of work on the porch. By "work" I mean drawing and writing in the the game design sketchbook and thinking big, deep, and very stoned thoughts about design. At 130 hand written/drawn pages or so it feels nearly finished; most of the NPCs have been sketched out now and once locations are done, we should be more-or-less finished with concept art and notes. I can see the whole outline of the thing now, there's a big world with lots of detail to draw from and I'm excited to explore it in-game! Alan Moore's stuff about Idea Space and PsychoGeography were really informative when it came to world-building. Also, taking lots of mini-naps to dream out scenarios and being able to see things better has been super helpful too. 

Programming: I've been working on a ground-up re-write in advance of working with others, trying to streamline and simplify things under the hood so that people can work with the templates I've made. Things should just run better, quicker, smoother, on more machines, browsers, and screens than before. 

Narration: In addition to the Action Maps and NPC Dialog Systems that help tell the story, I've created a Flashback Feature where the player decides if memories described are True or False, impacting their skills, traits and stats. These little 'backward branching' narrative sequences are where the procedurally-generated storytelling aspect factors in, and it also serves a mechanical function altering hidden variables and surfacing useful game info. It's a fun little push-your-luck-style mechanic where choosing False changes the past, but causes you to lose a little bit of yourself in the process...

Visuals: One of the things most frequently commented on by people I've shown the game has been screen legibility.  Apart from the  unfamiliarity with ASCII graphics described by non-gamers I've shown the game to, there were some serious issues with screen and font size reported by players. I'll admit, I hadn't really been designing for anyone else's screen (not knowing CSS  well) and this is what it looked like:

YIKES. Sorry to anyone who ever had to squint! After investing some hours into learning about proportional units and a little adaptive design stuff I had things looking better. We're making use of the screen, and the horizontal dividing bars stay in place from screen-to-screen (something I've probably spent a cumulative week of my life fiddling with previously). Here's the same location with the CSS overhaul:

I also added two new UI elements: a little tooltip that shows you the amount of time each click takes when you hover on a new location, and a pocket inventory rollup from the bottom of the screen:

It's just a better use of the screen's real estate. Since learning that CogMind exists, I'm compelled to step up my visuals as best I can in Twine Harlowe. Some experiments creating multi-layered overlapping Action Maps are taking place using Playscii, a super amazing ASCII graphical editor and game engine (WTF?). I'm even toying with the idea of doing animations somehow... as if this whole thing wasn't ridiculous enough as it is.

Anyway, expect a playable update with the new look and lots of new features a little closer toward the end of summer. Once that one's up, we'll have all of the design in place and then it's just content production from there on in.