Tales from Zilmurik

Sometime in June, my chain that I had maintained daily since January broke. I was watching Liberty stream and time just slipped by. Shameful, yes, but the core of the game was completed by that point, so technically, the first chain served its purpose. The game was brought to a releasable form, and all that needed to take place was beta testing.

What was found while beta testing was a whole other beast altogether. Many references to items were broken and certain other small things needed to be adjusted in order to function under all circumstances. Even the layout of the final battle was affected by faulty eventwork, but all that has been ironed out and the game is finally and truly complete.

In that time, I was contemplating cutting out the interactive chapters of Zilmurik and leaving it as a story to be read at any time. It would've saved me a lot of time and effort. What I realized while testing the final battle is that it really does lose a bit of its weight when it isn't compared to the history of the world and how it's expressed via front view combat. The theme is missing and that needs to be addressed.

So here we are - July 1st of 2019. This day is the beginning of The Second Chain. From today on, I will put work into every day until the Zilmurik Chronicles are complete. Having spent time working on both "The Most Dangerous Chicken" for the Abrupt Ending Party and "Finding A Heart" for the Rainbow of Positivity (game pages coming soon), I feel I've broken the stranglehold that the completion of "Tales from Zilmurik" had on my mind. I felt like I was done and that made jumping into new games and such suddenly a herculean task. Nowhere was this more evident for me than during the Rainbow of Positivity where I wanted to make one game, scrapped that, joined a new team, got no work done and made a new game to submit to my old team. I wasn't ready to "gam mak" again, but the spirit is coming back, and I feel confident that The Second Chain will not break!

It's good to be back.