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[manonamora-if-reviews]

Lucid Night, by Dee Cooke

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A trippy [refreshing] experience (4/5)

This was a very trippy experience, as lucid dreams can often be. It is surreal right from the start, finding yourself inside an airlock rather than cozy in your bed. Jumping from dreamworld to dreamworld, each with their specific "puzzle" and logic, you learn that you have trouble finding sleep, resting sleep especially. Having tried different remedies (each bleeding into the dream snippets funnily), you still struggle with getting good sleep.

The writing is pretty playful, going smoothly from the strangest descriptions of the dreamworld to a more frustrated tone of your awaken self. And vivid - painting lovely images, especially in the dreamworld.

The puzzles are fairly simple and fairly well hinted in the room descriptions and command responses. Even as a parser noob who doesn't always find the solution easily, it was still a smooth short game, with a satisfying end.

I wish my lucid dream were this fun!

Thanks for including a downloadable walkthrough too! I got to experience the "good" ending thanks to it!

[manonamora-if]

December Check-In

I promise I didn't almost forget :P Even if I definitely forgot to do the weekly devlog last Sunday... To be fair, it had been a week...

Recap of last month’s progress

IF Events in the Next Month

Plan for the next month

Still long post ahead. If you want a mini version, head over to itch.io!

November Progress

Still play more IF and maybe review. ✅

Finish the edits of Harcourt Ch5 ✅❌

Fix one of the semi-completed games: ❌either the Egg parser or TRNT (and make it a proper parser)

Finish that darn SugarCube Guide: ❌there aren’t much left in the guide to cover, but there are a few things to fix.

Again, I knocked the first one out of the park. I reviewed all inkJam, EctoComp, and Bare-Bones Jam entries (which helped me get on the main page of the IFDB). It was nice to play shorter games again - it makes reviewing pretty quick... Now that the IFComp is also over, I kind of want to go back and check out the entries I didn't manage to play.

As for the rest... It's been a bit of a hell of a month, and it's not looking like it's ending any time soon. Still, when I had some free time I managed to:

Finish my portion of the edits of Harcourt (and MelS was almost done with it... before he ran into computer problems - dw the file is safe!)

Assess the damage with The Roads Not Taken and come up with a plan to fix all of it. I also started on this one, but there is truly a lot of damage.

Make a bite game in binksi, Tower of Sleep, for the Two-Button Jam

Make a One-Button prototype, Don't press the Button, to test some JavaScript/jQuery (half-failure)

Make a zine for the first time: An Ode to Pissaladière

Make a new code template: the Character Creator

Submitted a bunch of seeds to the SeedComp!

Does it look like I got distracted by a shiny new thing instead of finishing my projects? Yes. Do I care? Nope. It brought me some joy and amusement in some weird months... Banging your head against the desk because code is not working is... not, obviously.

What’s happening in December?

A bunch of jams are happening on itch, because end of year means maybe some free time, and also, you might as well do something for the sake of saying you've made something.

The ShuffleComp (@neointeractives) has started, though the entries won't be available before January. You can listen to the kickass full playlist in the meantime!

The Sprouting Round of the SeedComp! (@seedcomp-if) has just started. There are 99 new seeds available for use to make a game! Deadline is March 1st.

The Deck-Month has just started, to make a game with Decker.

The PunyJam #4 ends in about 2 weeks (if you have the time to learn Inform w/ the Puny extension...)

and of course: la Partim 500 numéro 8, for those who want to do the Neo Twiny again... but French!

I'm probably gonna pop-off a Partim. I did it last year and it was fun :P

The PLANtm for December

December is a busy month for me, which includes a lot of time offline, full days travelling, and lots of planning. So I will take any free time I have and do fun stuff if I can!

But if I have space for IF, I'd like to:

Play more games! Well... I already am, just not really IF. My Steam Library is crying for attention. I would like to knock down maybe a dozen more IFComp entries if I can. There were a lot of good games, a lot of loooong games.

Code Ch5 of Harcourt. That will be MelS dependent - well, MelS's computer dependent...

Finish fixing The Roads Not Taken. I have a plan, I have the notes... I just need to sit down and re-code (and re-test).

Finish the Guide for real! I know SugarCube 2.37 is coming soon, which will affect the state of some pages (and maybe require more pages). BUT I've been working on fixing old pages (typos - re-explanation - clearer examples). So, this is likely to be done sooner rather than later...

~

Taking the list of TO-DO from August…

To-Do not require much of new stuff:

translate Escape Goncharov! into French. ✅

fix the bugs in EDOC + overall the French version to match

fix the bugs of TRNT + find a way to add the missing pieces (ongoing - translation unlikely)

fix the formatting of DOL-OS + translate into English ✅

update LPM with the missing content + translate into English ✅

No change this month :/

The rest of the To-Do pile was:

Finish The Rye in the Dark City (and maybe translate?)

Finish P-Rix - Space Trucker (and try to translate)

Finish Exquisite Cadaver (translation unlikely, current gameplay too complex to port for French)

Add a chapter to CRWL + fix/reopen the blog

Re-working TTTT to its originally planned state (lol, not likety)

Re-working SPS Iron Hammer (samesies)

Coding TTATEH (MelS dependent - shooting for end of year)

Emptying my inboxes (they are not all answered tho)

Honestly, this pile probably won’t get done this year…. Maybe TTATEH has a shot...