Okay, so, every couple of months I run down to a tiny little town in Kansas where nobody can reach me, in order to "decompress." Those who know me best know how important stress-management techniques like this can be... not for me, of course, but for the safety of the world at large.

And during my last trip, I happened to make a passing reference (to Sonya, my sometimes-collaborator) to BYOND and my projects past, which she surprised me by being very interested in.

And as I told her about one of those projects in particular... and highlighted all the problems and obstacles I'd faced in bringing it to life... I found myself thinking of ways around those obstacles and better ways of solving the problems.

So though at first I was mostly just shooting the breeze, by the time the weekend was over (which was, like, four days later, as a proper weekend should be), I found I'd been bitten very badly by the muse of game design.

I tried to ameliorate the effects by checking out Spuz... er, JT's progress on Newtopia, but that just brought the old familiar feeling back on even stronger.

So yesterday I started coding, building on the framework of ideas that I constructed over the course of hours-long conversations with Sonya.

Here's some pictures of the early results:



The new Ol' Quarry.



Some sort of zigguraty looking thing.



Neolithic swimming pool?



You can forget virtually everything that I said about the previous graphical remake, and of course, the ultra-aborted text version (killed by godless communist physicians in the negative seventeenth trimester!)

This, despite some small enhancements visible in the above screenies, is Old School Hedgerow Hall. Everything about it's better than the original in every way, but it's also way closer to my own vision than even the most recently hosted playable version was.

When will it be playable? This time around, I'm doing a doggedly systematic (at least for me) development process.

This weekend I got the movement systems in, as well as what world framework was necessary to support them, and have started the resource gathering system. Next weekend I'm going to tackle that in earnest (I can't do this during the week... I'm still writing), and hopefully the following weekend I can get crafting. After that, I suppose combat will come, and then magic, and then the rest of the world framework (seasons, weather, etc.) Character generation and burrows will probably come last.

If every week, I find a weekend's worth of time to devote to it, I'd say two months. However, that's an estimate, not a deadline, guarantee, or promise. Ignore that at your own peril, if you want to play. :P

To answer the obvious question: pre-existing lifetime subscriptions will still be good for burrow priveliges. As I said at the time, they're for the lifetime of the game... so if the game comes back to life, it brings the subscriptions with it.

Non-subscribers will be able to earn burrows in-game, though they will be quite a bit, uh, cozier at first.