Alas, I have little to report this week. I’ve worked on finishing off the graphics for procedural altar generation (there’s an incredible variety and I’m working up a really detailed entry on this, maybe for next week, maybe the week after), making sure that the player can correctly ‘l’ook at everything indoors, and sadly that’s about it…
… but this comparative lack of speedy development is
because I submitted my PhD! After three-and-a-third years of work, one serious illness that left me pretty much out of commission for about six months, and another far more serious illness that actually threatened my life, I’ve got the damned thing in (if anyone is interested, I have updated my academic profile (
http://www.york.ac.uk/sociology/our-staff/students/mark-johnson/) on the York site). I was expecting to feel profoundly nervous, but I feel oddly calm about the whole thing. I have a copy of the softbound thesis lying on my desk in front of me so that I can “revise” from it when the time comes to defend, but I’m having to make sure I’m not tempted into opening it and checking for typos or anything like that (though a pretty thorough typo search was conducted by both myself and two others). The next month or two have just opened up in front of me as wonderful blocks of time where no more thesis work is required (and it’s looking increasingly likely I’m going to have a game studies academic job on the horizon, but more on that as and when). I’m also going to start trying to write some more general games criticism stuff for some of the many games commentary sites out on the web, and when that actually starts happening I’ll naturally link to them here.
Anyway, this coming week, I’m therefore expecting major progress with a full seven days of coding – my intention is to finish off all the altar graphics, work on some more interior graphics, conclude everything to do with religious building interiors, and then move onto generating the interiors for some other, simpler buildings (maybe slums, lower-class housing, etc). I’m also going to submit the full 8500-word version of my roguelike semiotics paper (which I presented at a conference last year) to an academic journal at last, and I’m extremely happy with how it’s looking (
http://www.ultimaratioregum.co.uk/game/2014/02/22/the-semiotics-of-the-roguelike/).
Lastly, I was also on Roguelike Radio again! I got interviewed for an episode specifically about URR, and it was pretty excellent (I think). I recommend giving it a listen (
http://www.roguelikeradio.com/2015/01/episode-96-ultima-ratio-regum.html). See you next week, folks.