Jean Townsend's writing blog

Thank you to @whereisnanda, @mrsstavizzi, @featherdusterbelphie, and @andallgoodthings for the heads-up that Dashingdon's site, which currently hosts Guenevere, will be shutting down soon. Dashingdon has been a pillar of the CoG community for as long as I've been there, and he's been incredibly generous to provide free demo hosting for as long as he has.

I will do my best to get the Guenevere WIP moved elsewhere and will post a new link when that happens. And yes, I still have every intention of coming back to Guenevere, and I'm still counting down to the day when I can retire from my awful job and just write.

As always, thank you to everyone who still sends nice messages about the game after all this time. I do read them, and I wish I had enough spoons to reply to everyone, but every single one makes me happy!

EDIT: I've heard that some well-intentioned readers are archiving games from dashingdon. I appreciate the love for these games, but please let me take care of Guenevere. Please do not archive, publish, or otherwise share the Guenevere game file. I will keep the WIP available, and I don't want it to be online anywhere I didn't give permission for. Thank you!

Hi! I continue to get very nice asks, and I feel bad responding to just one when I can't respond to all of them. So here's an update:

My health and job have stabilized. That's not to say all my problems are fixed/cured, just that things are currently under control. I still have to do hours of physical therapy exercises each week, along with cooking a special diet, and limiting how much time I spend looking at screens. I had some treatments for my eyes that helped a lot, so they're no longer inflamed, but I have to work to keep them that way. Staying healthy takes a lot of time and work! This is pretty much how things will be for the rest of my life, but I'm grateful that I'm no longer in a state of physical suffering or extreme stress.

So, with the number of hours I have in a day, I can pretty much do my job and all the health maintenance stuff, and that's it. My job does pay well enough that I'm able to save almost half my income each month for early retirement, and I absolutely still plan to spend my retirement working on Guenevere and similar things. That's still what gets me out of bed in the mornings.

That said, it’s been years since my life circumstances were conducive to writing, and the pandemic has only exacerbated my existing health and job issues (as it has for many people). I’m extremely lucky to have a job that can be done online, but not well or easily. The amount of screen time I’ve had to put in over the past few months has not been great for my eyes, even with computer glasses, frequent breaks, etc. So using a computer for anything other than work hasn’t been much of an option, lately.

Still, I have to believe that something will change eventually. I’ll be ready when it does. I’ve made handwritten to-do lists of exactly what still needs to happen for Guenevere, along with plans for related content and how I want to roll all of it out. I haven’t lost interest (quite the opposite, honestly). If I were to become independently wealthy tomorrow, the first thing I’d do is sit down and work on Guenevere.

I have no idea what will happen next, and it’s likely that I won’t announce anything Guen-related until I have actual content ready to share. Even if that doesn’t happen until some far-distant future when I’m retired from my job, I’ll announce it here.

This time last year, we were told that our dog had months (at best) to live. His blood toxins had spiked from kidney disease, and he was very sick. Against all odds, he bounced back in February and had a wonderful year. He got to travel all over, meet new people, play with lots of other dogs, and have adventures in all kinds of places. I’m grateful that we had that unexpected time with him, and that it was so good.

At the beginning of this November, he started to get sick again. We did everything we could, but by the end of last week, his kidneys had shut down completely, and we had to say goodbye to him last Saturday. It was all very peaceful. His life was short but full, and we will never forget him.

Not dead, haven’t abandoned Guenevere.

(Sisyphus, having once again failed to roll that rock all the way up the mountain)

I’ve completely stalled out on rewriting the Camelot battle. At first I was excited to fix it, but I’m just so so so so so sick of rewriting the same stuff. One of my personal writing rules is that if something is tedious for me to write, it’s probably going to be tedious for people to read, and I should change what I’m doing. In this case, I don’t think it’s the battle scene itself that’s all that tedious; I’m just very tired of it.

I’m also feeling daunted by all the other stuff I’ll have to do before I feel ready to share more of the game, especially dealing with the issue of not being able to playtest without giving up the old save system. My heart is just not in figuring that out right now.

So I’ll probably do what I always do when I’m feeling overwhelmed and unmotivated, which is work on the backstory (of Ygraine, Uther, Merlin, etc). I may just let myself get absorbed in that for a while. I’m not going to pressure myself to finish the battle scene right now, as long as I’m doing something Guenevere-related.

I’m plugging along, more or less, with the new Camelot battle scene. The wake-up-early-to-write plan lasted for a week before I got hit with a crunch project at work, and then just when that was calming down, they decided to cut our license for a software that I really really need, so now I’m frantically scrambling to get stuff done (badly) without the software, while also mounting a campaign to bring it back. Sigh. But I am still getting little bits of Guen done here and there.

Another setback was that the old version of ChoiceScript that I’m using no longer appears to work locally (i.e. offline) in any browser I try (and I’ve tried a lot). It will still work online, but if I can’t run it locally, playtesting/editing becomes so cumbersome that the game will never be finished. I’ve kept the old version of ChoiceScript because I can’t get the password-save system to work in the newer versions. I know a lot of my readers like being able to save games, even if that giant-password system is ridiculous.

I haven’t been able to deal with this issue directly yet; at some point I’ll probably ask around on the CoG forum and see if anyone has ideas. The worst-case scenario is that I’ll have to update to new ChoiceScript and lose the password save. (There is an alternative save system I can use, but I don’t like it as much.) But maybe someone can help me come up with a workaround.

There’s good news and less-good news.

Good news: All of the endings for Guen II are really truly complete, so I can now playtest the draft version from start to finish for all choices/endings, with no game-crashing bugs that I know of (though there are still plenty of continuity bugs, especially in the form of people who ought to be dead or absent popping up alive and present, but those are fixable).

The less-good news: Over the past three years I have spent probably hundreds of hours unsuccessfully trying to get the Camelot branch battle simulator to be fun to play. The simulator works, more or less, but no matter what I do, it’s just not satisfying to me. So I asked a friend who knows the game well to play it, and they agreed that the battle simulation in its present form is just... well, not up to the standards set by the rest of the game.

The battle simulator is based on a troop attrition mechanic, so you start with X number of British troops of different types, and X number of Frankish troops of different types, and each round they fight and have casualties. Guen’s choices affect the number of casualties on each side. The troop numbers keep counting down until one side has too few to continue, and the other side wins. This seemed like a really cool idea when I designed it, but in practice, it’s repetitive, a little frustrating, and kind of soulless.

So, after literally years of trying to make this work, I’m going to abandon the troop attrition mechanic and rewrite the entire battle with a simpler mechanic to make it more personal and more cohesive. This decision has made me feel SO much better about everything! I’m actually really excited to get to work on the new battle scene.

I don’t have anything concrete to show for May, but I did a bunch of little things here and there: playtesting, editing (including the Frankmarch work I talked about last month), and some more work on the prequels and backstory which is adding substantially to the game world and future plot points.

I finally got a bit of breathing room in my work schedule! I sowed wildflower seeds around my house, and took some time to read books, which I hardly ever get to do any more.

For Christmas, my family members each got me a volume of the Lancelot-Grail Vulgate translations, so I have the whole series and am currently reading the Merlin volume. It’s helping me develop more details of the Guenverse backstory. I figured out what I want to do with Vortigern and his tower, and how that will fit into what I already had planned for the later Guen games.

I didn’t add anything new to the game this month, but I did play through the Frankmarch branch and do some editing. I was going to add more material to Frankmarch, but now I think maybe all I need to do is tighten up and enhance what I already have. It looks like this coming weekend is going to be blissfully free from work and social obligations, so I should be able to spend it doing just that.

Sorry I didn’t post anything at the end of February; at that point, I hadn’t gotten any writing done, and I was tired of only being able to post about life issues.

The good news for March is, I finished the Arthur romance ending! I had hit a block with it, so I deleted almost all of it and rewrote from scratch. I’m much happier with it now.

Work has not eased off as hoped. The internal audit is still ongoing and will be for a while, and now it sounds like there may be some huge restructuring handed down from on high, so everyone’s stressed about what that might mean.

My dog, however, continues to defy all expectations and baffle the vet. His toxin levels are still far lower than we ever could have hoped for in December, and he’s getting to try some fun new activities with our dog walker, now that the weather is warmer.