“Time’s up, Mr. Stone.” After glancing at his PMN pocket watch and calling a halt, the geezer in the crumpled corduroy suit removes his spectacles, and starts packing up his stuff. Into the satchel goes the half-finished Battle of Kohima tapestry, the dented tartan thermos flask, and the copy of The Days Run Away Like Wild Horses Over the Hills. I could beg for an extension – explain that I only need a few more months of peace and quiet to finish Tally-Ho, my unripe aerial-wargame-with-a-twist – but I know there’s no point. Under that corrugated breast pocket beats a heart as hard as a Jagdtiger glacis plate.
Blimey, where did the time go? My six-month game-making sabbatical has positively flown past, and although I have one and a half releases to show for it, the historical title I’d hoped to get done is, I’m afraid to say, still some way from completion.
On the plus side, I return to the pleasant grindstone that is Tally-Ho Corner with a promising pre-alpha on my workbench, finely honed GameMaker skills, and a clear understanding of the pros and cons of AI-aided game development. Having abandoned more than one work-in-progress since the start of the year, I’m now under no illusion about my creative shot traps. Crucially, unlike its shelved forerunners, Tally-Ho started producing pleasure and surprises early in the dev process, and wasn’t an intimidating tangle of code by the end of month #1.
What can you expect from the next six moons of THC? While the foxers may not return immediately (Roman has agreed to provide weekly Romanesques) in all other respects it will, I hope, be business as usual until Christmas at least. Anticipate an unpredictable mix of news and reviews, extended coverage of the obscure but deserving, and occasional competitions and digressions. Airlifters (the generous Cornerites whose regular payments keep THC lively and largely ad-free), I’ll be unpausing your subscriptions at the end of next week.
As Napoleon almost certainly didn’t say:
In war[-game design], as in prostitution, amateurs are often better than professionals.
(And there was me fearing I’d never find an opportunity to crowbar in that “quote”).
Welcome back! It would be interesting to know what happened to website traffic over the past 6 months, providing that’s information you’d be willing to share, of course. As someone who has a job that involves online eyeballs, it would be useful, even if it was just a narrative account of coarse trends, e.g. “hits slowly tailed off to around 10%” or something similar.
Sounds like the sabbatical was at least partially successful then.
Looking forward to your writing accompanying my morning coffee once again. I’ll get my camera equipment dusted off in anticipation of the occasional informative tour (if you decide to still do those).
Welcome back!