I have been stalling out in my attempts to move forward with the compiler. It's frustrating and messy and I've been having little energy for it lately. So, I decided to shift my focus onto something more fun for now.

When I decided to put Geas on hiatus for a while, I mentioned I was going to work on some shorter projects. VCLua turned out to be the first one, but it took quite a bit longer than I anticipated (which is silly, I should have been less oblivious to the size of the task, but anyway). Really though, what I meant was small games.

So, I decided I would finally work on the game that's been brewing in my head for a while now: "Courage". It is related to Geas: it's going to fill in the backstory for Omen. Omen is in Journey to Black Mountain, and stars as Kiel's useless stupid friend. In Geas, he is a great-sword fighter working as a soldier in the ranks of the Mar Knights, and squired to Sir Athwin, one of the Knights' most prodigious soldiers and Captain of the Watch. That's a pretty big jump, and the story of what happened in the five intervening years is pretty important to Omen as a character, but I was mostly going to just handle it through dialogue and cutscenes during Geas. (Geas opens with Kiel and Tanessa embarking on a trip to visit Omen in Mar City.)

When I decided I needed a smaller game to work on though, I felt that I still wanted to do an RPG. This helps me solidify systems and build up a library of useful code for Geas. I like the idea of fleshing out the backstory of the various characters in Geas, and I felt that the gap between Omen from Black Mountain and the Omen in Geas was kind of odd if you don't have the whole story, so this felt like a natural choice. It's going to run from the point that Omen leaves Shoda's Brook (heroically running away in the middle of the night while telling no one but Kiel) through the point that he becomes Athwin's squire. This is the formative time for his "transformation", so it's the important bit.

Anyway, I set off to get started and hit a big snag: Maped3 wouldn't run on my computer. I upgraded to Windows 7 last year and, while I'd heard that people had problems with ME3 in Vista, I didn't think they existed in 7. I was wrong, it turns out! (Edit: But not really. See the comments on this post.)

So my other new project, which is going to take front-and-center for the time being, is called "Lichen", and it's a map editor that I'm writing within the Verge engine. I'm taking a lot of cues from Maped2 since Grue won't shut up stop waxing poetic about it. I've been meaning to do this for some time anyway since it will mean we finally have a working map editor for any platform that supports the Verge runtime.

I've only gotten a few evenings or so into it, but here's what it's looking like so far.

Lichen is not terribly functional at the moment, but if you want to play around with it for the moment, go check it out on github: https://github.com/speveril/lichen. If you have any requests, suggestions, whatever, let me know.