Today marks the ten year anniversary of my marriage to my lovely wife, Wendy. Ten years went by surprisingly fast.
Wendy, if you’re reading this (of course you are since I’m going to tell you to read it), prior to meeting you, I would have never imagined that I would have found what I found in you. The support, love, and sense joy you give to me is a level of magnitude greater than I ever could have expected. I don’t deserve you, but I’m glad you’re mine.
Love,
Mark
I do a lot of things. I write, I make software like StoryBox and TrackerBox, and I make games and music. Some times, I find it really hard to figure out what to focus on. One week I want to do this, and the next week, I want to do that. It really makes it hard to finish anything new.
Why am I telling you this?
Because, right now, when I should be writing, I’m spending my time working on a game, instead.
I spent 7 years working on games that other people wanted made. It’s one of the reasons I never released another game of my own after Derelict. I tried a couple times, but the GFOP (games for other people) sucked my time and eventually burned me out on working on games at all. I honestly thought I’d made my last game, especially after I tried porting one for a friend of mine and couldn’t complete it. I hope he won’t hate me forever. It was just a case of complete and utter burnout. In the last eight months, I think I spent a grand total of 20 hours working on games (the failed attempt to help out a friend).
But, somewhere near the start of July, I started to get an itch to work on another one. I didn’t start right away, but I did poke around in my code for Infinite Suns (a game I have yet to complete) for a bit. I ended up deciding that it was too much work to finish that game right now (and too costly).
But some friends of mine who participate in a public conversation on YouTube (Indie Indie Conversation) said some interesting things about the flash game market which got me thinking.
I’ve never programmed in Flash before about two weeks ago, so I had no idea what was required, but they helped me get set up (really easy – FlashDevelop and Flixel) and I’ve spent the last two weeks buried in game development.
It’s fun for the first time in a long time. Yes, it’s putting off some work on the books, which doesn’t really please me, but I have to see this thing through, or it will eat at me that I didn’t finish.
Ok, it turns out that a couple people had changed the type of their story from Story to something else prior to updating their version of StoryBox to 1.4.113 or 1.4.114. Unfortunately, this caused a problem with the whole multiple story mechanism as there weren’t any stories at all to count.
So, this build fixes that issue. If you have accidentally (or on purpose) changed your story to some other document type, this build will let you change it back and will create the proper items in the file. DO NOT use 1.4.113 or 1.4.114 to do this as they won’t create the story information correctly. If you have already tried to do this in those versions, you’ll have to create a new story from the menu and move all of your documents from the old story into it.
You can also send the project to me and I can fix it for you.
This build is mostly about performance improvements while writing/editing. Most will be obviously noticeable only with larger documents or slower computers.
This latest version of StoryBox has a huge number of fixes, improvements and features included. The biggest feature/change is “real” support for multiple stories in the same project. Before, you could create additional stories, but you couldn’t keep track of their word counts separately, and exporting the one you wanted was confusing. Now, you can track wordcounts separately for each story as well as continue to view the overall word count of the project. When you use the File->Export menu, you now get a list of all the stories to select from.
For a list of all of the changes, check the download page.
So, today is the last day to get Shattered free with the purchase of StoryBox or TrackerBox. After that, well, you’ll just have to buy it separately. 🙂