I suppose you want the room count, don't you. I will give it to you. When? Now, I should think. You look forward to it, do you? I think you do. ...Nine rooms, I got done this month. All clues, all descriptions, all scenery, all actions handled. I can play through those nine rooms and it is a solid, playable IF game.

This is most of what I call "chapter 0" in my notes. After another couple of puzzles, the player transitions to "chapter 1". That's where most of the game opens up, at least a little bit.

But how many rooms are there in this game? I hear you cry. Okay, that's a fair question. There are 82. So you might conclude that I am 11% done with this thing and have eight months of work remaining. And that's... not a completely terrible estimate.

I don't mean that it's my estimate. Or that it's accurate. Rather, I guess, that the possible errors fall in both directions. So I can't say it's definitely too long or too short.

Twine superhero Leon Arnott has created a bookmarklet that allows authors or curators to quickly add new Twine-based entries to the IFDB. Once this JavaScript one-liner lives in your browser’s bookmarks, you can navigate to an online Twine game, open the bookmarklet, and follow the prompts.

(An improvement, should anyone feel up to it, would involve letting one back out of the process via the resulting dialog’s Cancel button. Feel free to tell me about the existence of improved versions. I share this code as-is because helping the Twine community sit at the larger IF table makes me happy, and also because lazy.)

The updated RealMyst is now up on Steam (for Mac/Win). It also appeared on the Mac App Store briefly yesterday, but Cyan pulled it back out citing "a small issue". (It's not clear what the issue is, or if the Steam release has the fix already.)

(Screenshots from an iMac, 2.7GHz, lots-o-RAM, AMD Radeon HD 6770M 512 MB. I don't know a damn thing about video cards but maybe that means something to you.)

Jason recently played through LEGO Batman 2: DC Superheroes, and found himself quite impressed at not just its overall quality but its surprising and subtle characterization of Superman. Starting with a deeper examination of this game, Jason and Matt discuss adaptations of comic books into games and film, and the ways that some games can uniquely express character concepts not just through story but through the mechanics and language of gameplay.

Enjoy.