Well, it has been a slow week for Wormhole. My excuse for this tragic state of affairs is a good one - we are moving house! Mid way through the process this is not good, but it will be next week when we both have an entire room of our own as an office. I will be reunited with all my retro 'junk' once again. Yay.

On the project I had the idea that it would be fun to find a torch item that you can fit to Chloe who will light the way down into really dark areas. The lighting is so atmospheric that it's now steering some of the game design. I like this organic approach to game dev - do stuff and see where it leads. Of course, while it sounds simple there are consequences. Not least that the bot friend should behave in a sensible way and shine the light where it is most needed - e.g. where we are going when heading into darkness. Alternately, when stood around, the player can actually look up, so it makes a lot of sense if Chloe sees this and shines the light upward too. Schedule be damned!

I also found another save and restore problem. So - shoot down an enemy bot in level A, then rebuild as Chloe who follows you to level B. Here, we save the game. When it restores there is no base bot to rebuild the Chloe object into because the object followed you across levels. The rest of the system, you will have guessed, saves the changes to existing level objects rather than just dumping the whole lot (my save games are tight as you would expect from an 8 bit coder). Anyway, it's an easy fix to make it rebuild a new bot and then restore to it, but still - now it's two things and not one thing. Part of me doesn't like that. But it works. I should stop thinking about it.

Next week I'll finesse the friend bot logic some more. It's an important area and needs to be convincing. And, this stuff will look good on the trailer, which is now a priority.

What else? I'm going to be helping with the design on a new survival horror game (with narrative and puzzles) called Whisper in the Mirror. Here's some info...

And, there's talk of a very interesting Spectrum Next/Amiga/PC port of a high profile Speccy game with me on the code. Early days for this project, but stay tuned!

Lastly, congrats to RevSoft on the success of their Broken Sword Reforged Kickstarter. Of course, I just paid £200 to a company I co-founded for a game I wrote the engine for... lol, but the new version game I know is great, and the rewards are cool, and highly collectable. Maybe I should have backed for 2x or more! Hmmm.