So I noticed a couple of people asking if my site is abandoned. A completely reasonable question, since I haven’t really said anything since February.

The answer is sort of, yeah, probably. But it’s not because I don’t want to keep writing spanking games. I keep messing around with different gaming ideas, and then stalling out before they get anywhere, most of them before I even put pencil to paper.

The problem is that fundamentally, RPGs and RPG combat are my true love. So any efforts to do anything else, generally just don’t hold my attention for very long. Writing CYOA and nothing but CYOA can get very monotonous for me, especially when I try to add gamification elements to it. This is what happened to the Cat Burglar game I was working on, as well as Samantha Stone.

One nice thing about Scarlet Moon was that I was able to bounce between the combat and the writing, so there was usually some part of the game I was in the mood to work on. The combat mechanics also gave me a nice way of tying in some character development into the CYOA part, so that even if there weren’t a whole lot of impactful choices in the fiction, players could at least influence how their character developed.

However, RPG combat is *difficult* and it can very easily get quite complex. Plus, of course I have yet to find any game engines that can handle a mix of CYOA and RPG combat well (all efforts I’ve seen in something like Twine have felt awkward to play, and very complicated to code, meanwhile RPGMaker is *terrible* at handling walls of text). So I have to roll my own. But UI’s are *hard*, and time consuming and I’m terrible at them. Meanwhile, real life is just getting more and more demanding as I get older.

So if I did write another game, it’d probably just be on the terminal, and most people don’t really go for that. Second, of course I’d need to figure out some RPG combat mechanics that can be fun, but also easy to work with. Scarlet Moon’s were fun, but rather difficult to work with.

So, yeah. I’ll keep maintaining the site of course, and I’m sure I’ll keep fiddling with stuff in the background, but who knows if and when I’ll ever make something else. But if I do, I’ll post both here and animeotk!