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Tuesday, September 10, 2019

September Update




 It's been a tough month. That means reevaluating things to work out the best way to move forward. I've talked before about making the projects I do smaller so that they can be completed between these re evaluations. It's clear that UFO a Dracula is to big to fit in these constraints. It's realistically a years work to complete the chapters I have planned. I don't really want to release the chapters individually or truncate it to finish it faster. I had gotten quite far on writing chapter two. I'm thinking future releases using the same production system will go back to being about the size of clicky clicks dungeon and will need to stand on their own. They can have sequels if they're popular. I still want to produce interactive fiction things. And I plan to do more with the art style I've been working with recently using text characters. the scale of future projects will need to be reduced. but work continues on UFO a Dracula.

 At the moment donating on the clicky clicks dungeon page is the only way people have to financially support production. Thanks to every one who has. I'm not sure how I'm going to publish space owl going forward.  It has got it's day a week back though, now deadlines have passed. And I've got roughs of a few more pages on the go. The morgawr print isn't available any where either. I'm considering using a print on demand service for that and other stuff in the same style. I'm trying to work out how to make more stuff available for people who want it. I've got the beginnings of some new designs. They can stand on there own but hopefully compliment whats going on with my interactive fiction stuff. 



 Before disaster struck earlier this month I was chugging along with UFO a Dracula, as well as a few experiments. One of them is with animating on the zx spectrum just by editing attribute information. This means changing the colours of squares that contain text characters rather than changing the text characters them selves. This can be done much faster. So I can do animation even with my asm programing ability. I don't think this blog can display gifs so I guess i'll tweet that so you can see. It's just a horse running. It's for no particular reason. I was just scratching an itch from thoughts I had when I started working with the spectrum. I've no plan to expand this into a bigger project even though I can see a lot of possibilities. I can't justify putting more time in this right now.

This month I also discovered talktotransformer.com . Go and have a play with it. You give it some text and a neural network tries to continue it producing more text. It may act as an interesting creative prompt. I've experimented with those web gadgets you may have seen that generate film names. Part of creating things is combining existing things in new ways. In order make these kinds of generators you have to create lists of the kind of things you want it to combine. This can be a useful exercise in itself. And its the same with talk to transform. I gave it film synopsis to see what it would come up with. Then started coming up with my own concise statements to put in. These are the kind snippets you can put into your own brain to work on as well. Having tools like this to mangle and regurgitate text can open up possibilities as you come up with stuff to throw at it.


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