Man the last year has been busy!
Rapid fire TLDR summary time, go!:
- Started an indie game studio with my brother! BAM!
- Tearcell Game Studio
- Been writing a whole video game! BAM!
- Somnipathy
- I’m excited about my science again! BAM!
- Caaaaan’t really talk about what I do at work xD
- Plotted out and outlined my next three PsyEn Project books! BAM!
- Silence & Vanity: A Banquet of Monsters
- Insight: Colourless Green
- Beasts of the Western Horizon
- Started seriously plotting out a completely unrelated novel! BAM
- Hyperpop Apocalypse
- Aaaaannnnd something else I can’t talk about until my next post! 😉
And now to elaborate a bit!
Now then, in regards to the first two points…
In April 2022 the Ludum Dare 50 Game Jam occurred: a 48 hour game jam in celebration of the series’ 20th anniversary. The theme for this game jam was “Delay the Inevitable”. While we weren’t initially fans of the theme, we ended up focusing a gameplay loop around delaying sleep in a game we called Somnipathy. Uninspired as far as titles go, perhaps, but we ended up doing pretty well in the competition overall, but more importantly, our team got really, really into the whole process. This resulted in at the time both of our artists being interested in continuing the project… and when your artists wanna keep doing a project… well, here we are just over a year later, running our own tiny little indie game studio and fleshing out the original concept into a full-ass game.
The whole experience of writing an entire video game will be its own retrospective series when I’m done doing just that.
As for the science in my life… it’s probably come up in another post that I am a Molecular Biologist and Biochemist by training. It’s been an interesting year in the biotech sector with layoffs happening left and right… that somehow ended up with me being in a better position than I was in previously. Working on projects that are more suited to my skillset and under different management that has me feeling far more appreciated than I was before.
Good times!~
The only really unfortunate thing about being so focused on Somnipathy is the fact that it has left me with precious little time for the PsyEn Project – or any other writing project of mine for that matter. Thankfully that doesn’t mean I don’t have time or energy to think about the stories and what needs to be happening in them, or taking notes here and there. As a result, I’ve been able to flesh out the narrative and technical summaries of the next three stories that follow A Witch in the Wrong Place. It’s probably best that I took so much planning time with these, stories… as they are so deeply tied into what happened in Hushpuppy and Nova’s latest adventure. Going forward none of the stories will be as standalone as my earlier works within this universe I’ve created.
I can’t wait to get back to all these badass ladies!~
As for the unrelated work, I think I’ve mentioned on the site before another writing project I’ve been planning for awhile – Hyperpop Apocalypse – which is my upcoming Magical Girl project. Can’t say too much about it yet, other than that for now I think it will be a single, standalone book, and I’m very excited to mix the magical with the mundane as I touch on themes of choice and cooperation.
This story is going to be very much my jam.
And with that, I think I can call us just about caught up. There are a few more things that I cannot yet talk about here, but I will definitely post about in the coming weeks.
As ever thanks for reading, and I’ll see you in the next one!
-JT