John Ayliff (Space Goblin Games) is a creator of text-based games and interactive fiction
I've made some progress on Foolish Earth Creatures this month, although most of that has been filling out chapter structures with placeholder text so there's nothing very interesting to show. Unless you find this kind of thing interesting:
A few weeks ago I filled out a Canadian government survey on generative AI in the arts. (The survery is still up as of this blog post, in case any Canadian readers want to fill it out.)
The survey was hilariously biased towards AI (questions are all like “What help does your organization need in order to adopt more AI?”), and by the time I got to the free text entry questions at the end I was pretty pissed off.
But one question, in amongst a list of questions about how your organization currently uses AI, was “Does your organization have an AI policy?” I initially clicked “no” to this along with all the other questions, but later on went back and changed it to “yes”, because I do have a clear gen-AI policy, although I hadn't written it down. My policy is that I don't use it.
So for the record:
I will never use generative AI in any capacity.
I do not consent to the use of my work in any project that uses generative AI.
Early dev diary this month as I'm going travelling tomorrow and don't know if I'll have time to do any writing until next month.
I've launched small interface update to Seedship. It should be live on itch.io, the App Store and Google Play.
Once again I haven't had a huge amount of time to work on the game this month, and what I have done has been routine filling in of chapters so I don't have anything very interesting to share. But I'm committed to doing a dev diary every month, so here's a companion piece to my post about space villains, this one about the space heroes who oppose them.
I've just launched an update to Beyond the Chiron Gate that adds a dark-on-light colour scheme.
Where would a space hero be without their trusty spaceship? On the ground, that's where.
This month I've revised the overall structure of the game and come up with something I'm happy with, but I haven't had a lot of time to work it so I haven't getten back to the writing yet. But the project was actually in a good place for me to step back and let it “lie fallow” for a little while, so taking a break at this point will hopefully help me overall.
But that means I don't have anything to show in this diary, so instead here is a fluffy listicle of some of my favourite space villains who inspired the game, and my personal crazy fan theories about each of them.
Big milestone this month: the game now has one path where I can play all the way from start to finish without encountering any placeholder text.
I've been thinking about the design lessons I've learned from Beyond the Chiron Gate now that it's been out for a few years, and I thought I'd do a little post about one topic: achievements.