A Simple Way To Go Faster Than Light That Does Not Work

The test was a great success. We played 17 games in a couple of hours, both large and small sizes. The game is a blast, even when I was playing only against remote players. (mrmorse was the only person to show up at HQ, about an hour into it.) There's a lot about playing online over a text-and-graphic interface that's different about playing in person, and it turns out that the differences are fun for their own reasons.

The QA aspect of it went quite well, too. Zarf ended up with a good-sized list of small improvements to pound in tomorrow, and I found myself with some more website bugs to squish.

I want to play more big games of werewolf, and am frustrated that the Volity Network isn't full of people get! Grr! We've gotta change this. (Well, yes.)

Other notes:

* Volity needs chat channels. In Werewolf, if you get killed you're forbidden to speak, and when your only interface to the world is a text chat this makes you completely invisible; kind of a bummer! Several people suggested a "graveyard" channel where the dead could kibitz out of earshot from the squabbling villagers.

* Gamut (not Volity) needs a "sticky-ready" control of some sort, for when you don't care how a game is configured, you just want to play it. When you're in sticky mode, a config change would not unready you. (In reality, the referee would send a "you've been unreadied" message to the player, but Gamut would immediately say "OK I'm ready!" back to the ref and not show anything to the user.)

Having caught someone's interest within, I submitted a level-two application to one of the angel groups yesterday. If we're just as good as everyone else who got a form to fill in, our chances of being invited to give a presentation are maybe 15 percent. I like to think our pitch is better than everyone else's, but it's a variable completely outside of my control -- maybe the other 14 applicants are all cancer cures -- so the confident speech that aspartaimee and the Andys have been training me to pour into my business writing falters here.

daerr thinks we impressed the fellow with whom we met on Thursday, so assumedly he'll put in a good word for us. We'll see... I'm told that they'll get back to me, and everyone from the group has been very good about communication so far. (I take this as a hopeful sign, since this same group was among those to silently ignore my application last fall.)

D and I had coffee this evening and talked a lot about what to do next with volity.net, now that Gamut is able to respond safely to Web browser links (on Mac and Windows, anyway). I'm energized with ideas and direction but I also feel doomed. It's tough to hack on Volity when our financial fate is so uncertain. I told him that I felt like I was rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic, but that's actually not the best metaphor. It's more like I'm feeding Schrödinger's Cat.

Last November, we figured that June was our drop-dead deadline for having funds. Well, it's June, and we don't have a check in hand yet... but we do have at least a couple of sources sniffing interestedly at us, and it's not like we're flat out of seed yet. I call this schedule slip. We can handle this.

I am writing the user manual for Gamut. It will be good. You will like it.

I know I'm on the right track in my work when I feel full of existential dread. No joke. It's been true for years, and in areas of my life outside of Volity: When I hit upon something I instinctively know I should do right now, I feel overcome with a sense of personal fragility and mortality. This sounds distressingly Shelleyesque or summat, O that I should fade away naught but dust on the la di da, but it's true. And there ain't no better motivator! Whatever works, I guess.

Also Fluxx 3.1 is in testing; it's right in Gamut's game finder window. You should play it. It is good.

Someone made a Gamut page at Softpedia. (Not that I had heard of this website before, but tsall good.) They went through the trouble of taking their own screenshots instead of ripping off the perfectly good ones I made for Gamut's page on volity.org. Whoever it was just sat alone at various game tables and shouted the name of their website in all caps. Whatever pleases you, my friend. I went ahead and submitted some information about the most recent version.

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There's now a small and slowly growing crowd of regulars in the Volity devchat, every day. Most of them I didn't know before this month. I thought the developer beta would start mostly with some local folks I know who've been wanting to get involved, and while that is happening, the first real outside game development is coming from heretofore strangers.

This is quite excellent and I am very pleased, even if they are all Python hackers, ho ho. (Actually I love to see the devchat awash in Python code snippets as they give each other programming advice for soon-to-be Volity games. Really very good.)

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I spent maybe six hours writing three business letters today, all in the partnership-seeking vein. Not a complaint; I write slowly simply because I write carefully, and with letters whose ultimate message is gold plz, I really don't mind my own pokiness. It's not so good when I'm trying to write a book, that's all.

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Saw Thank You for Smoking last night with friends and it was pretty good I guess but my mood was pre-ruined by my subway ride to the theater where some kids were spitting at me. I think. I'm not sure, because for some reason (maybe from having very little social contact this week) I dropped into this stupid third-grade bully-survival mentality and became determined not simply not acknowledge their existence, so I didn't look at them or listen to them (had iPod). This really bothered me; sitting there just taking it, I ended up feeling pretty emasculated, to be honest. I realized a split second too late that I would have felt a lot better if, after disembarking, I flipped off the car they were in as it went by.

Come to think of it, I enjoy flipping things off a lot. I flip off the neighbor's dog every chance I get. Maybe I'll just make a personal habit of flipping off everyone in the T after it starts to pull out, from now on. I mean: easy points. Fish in a barrel!

Anyway had fancy-pants drinks after the thing and all told spent like $30 on the evening and holy crap. I'm not doing that anymore, not until I have a salary again.

Gamut 0.3.3 is out. Has sexy new icon Zarf made based on the logos that Rob designed for us. (But it is not the logo. You will have to download it to see it, hmm?) Also has a Game Finder window that auto-refreshes, finally.

A couple of people filed tickets (and a couple more commented to me offline) about the Windows download smellin funny. This is my ignorance of Windows culture and user expectations coming through (though I suppose I could have foreseen the business about the newlines in the README/CHANGELOG being all funked up in NotePad). I have made amends with the Windows package found with this release, but I expect that I still got some things wrong. Please don't be shy about letting me know, if you notice any.