The best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men

So, long time no see eh?  I had meant to write another update on the progress of Melkhior's Mansion in January, then April, then May, then July... you get the idea, but something always managed to get in the way.  A few people have been asking after progress, so here's what's been happening on the project this year...

Very little.

I took a break from coding Melkhior's at the start of the year because, to be honest, it was getting me down a bit.  It's a huge & very technical project, which is pure madness really, and I've coined the term "cranial abuse" to describe the pain of the process.  So, as you do as a programmer when you're stuck on one project, you start another to re-kindle the sense of fun.  That project is another 128K-only conversion of a PC title styled in the form of a Speccy game, and again somewhat hush-hush until I'm certian it can all fit in memory and realistically be a thing.  Interestingly it's a type of game which I have never written before, and traditionally don't like playing, so it's a curious endevour.  That progressed well for a few months, and made me smile again, but is currently stalled as the main (PC) game developer takes a break from such things.  Always remember that real life is much more important than all this, which is just a hobby & distraction really - personal health & wellbeing is everything.

Interestingly for MM, the other game made me look at some of my code a-fresh, and has meant that some optimisations from it can be bought over to MM, where speed & memory are in very short supply.  The two games can be developed in tandem, as both have similar complexities despite being entirely different types of game, and can share some of the progress.

Also affecting all this is the ever-quickening decline of my development laptop.  It's an old HP Pavilion number from 2011, and so is somewhat showing it's age, despite having it's internal drive replaced with an SSD, and a new battery pack some years back.  It's getting less and less stable as the OS moves forward - it was a Windows 7 machine at birth - and the charging system is beginning to fail.  I am now lucky enough to have a replacement laptop, which is an absolute beast (Acer Predator), but has the unfortunate quirk of having an American keyboard, which I'm using as a UK layout within Windows so I can continue to touch-type as I normally would on any other machine.  This throws up a few quirks - finding the key for the # symbol for example, or even more difficult, the back slash character,  I've only been using it for a short while, and mostly during that time with an external keyboard - so no issue - but as I edge over to using it as a true laptop I find my mis-types causing unintentional havoc.

The other knock-on from moving to another machine is gathering all the required files & installs onto that new machine.  I've lived on the old laptop for around 12 years, and so it's full of old & odd applications and data spread randomly across the drive.  So this is a time to reduce the clutter, purging the old unsed stuff and arranging what's to keep meaningfully, but I also have to 'pursuade' a modern Windows 11 machine to accept a lot of old applications which it doesn't really want to in it's modern 64-bit world.  So far so good though - I can build all the required data files, and compile and run both projects.

So... is the MM conversion to the Speccy dead?  No.  When will it be released?  Sometime. Maybe.  I'm going to continue going at my own pace on all this and see what happens.  If it gets left behind then I know that I gave it a damn good shot, but it's not dead yet.  The original intent was to get two Speccy games finished this year - now it'll probably be none - but you never know.  I think I have to release "something" of MM, even if just to a small group as a demo, once it gets to a reasonable point...