After only a couple extra weeks of work (and non-work -- oh, PAX, you great distraction) I am declaring my iOS IF interpreter ready for beta-testing.

Again, this is not Hadean Lands. The first game I will distribute this way will be The Dreamhold, a tutorial IF game. It will be a free download. (Really, The Dreamhold is already a free download -- you can play it on my web site or in iPhone Frotz. I will be packaging it as a standalone IF app with my new interpreter code.)

As I said, I'm doing this for buzz, and to get feedback on the UI design. But as a bonus, this release of The Dreamhold will contain a brand-new dynamic map. I figure that mobile IF players don't want to draw their own maps. (I mapped all the IF I played when I was a kid... stacks of scrap paper all over the computer room. When you're standing on the subway in rush hour, it's not so simple.) So the game will track your progress, and fill in a map for you as you play.

I hope testing won't run too long, and The Dreamhold will be out by the end of April. (I know, last update I said "early April". Turns out that was wrong.)

I commented on Monday that I would get an update posted "in a couple of days". That wasn't procrastination; I wanted to be able to say I'd hit an interesting milestone before I headed off to a week of GDC. Didn't happen! Sorry. So, here's the somewhat-less-than-a-mile marker of progress I've got.

First, the game: the game is progressing. That is all I have to say about it. (Yes, there will be more detailed reports before the "It's done" report. But not right now.)

First and a half: Let's assume that if I had a release date to announce, I'd announce it, okay? (I wish I didn't have to explain that every time.)

But here is what I can say, because this is the open-source part: I have made great progress this month on the technical end of the project. That is to say, the iOS port of the IF interpreter.

I've just released an update to Meanwhile. Is this exciting? I hope it is, because this release contains new high-definition artwork. Digitally remastered from Jason Shiga's original files!

(I've always wanted to say "digitally remastered". One has fewer and fewer opportunities these days.)

On iPhone 4 (or other retina-scale displays, such as the newer iPod touch) you will see a sharper, clearer Meanwhile. You can also zoom in farther than before, a full 2x, to see this art in all its detail.

Older devices (such as iPad 1 and 2) cannot display the sharper artwork at normal zoom. But you can still zoom in to 2x to see the high-resolution art.

To celebrate this, I am offering Meanwhile for a impulse-buy-delighting $0.99 -- for today only. Jason and I think that the app is its own best advertisement -- everyone who plays with it is immediately in love with the design. So, we want more people to play with it. Pass the word around to your friends.

A new (tiny) IF work -- Key Features! This was commissioned by MakerBot Inc. in honor of their upcoming product announcement, which will be at CES on Monday.

MakerBot is a nifty 3D printer company, and that's what's neat about this game: you can literally print out the feelies as real-life objects as you play! If you have a 3D printer. (If not, you can still look at the model renderings to see what they'd look like. The links will appear as you play.)

You can play Key Features online or download the game file. (Use your browser's "download" option to do that, as the game file may come across as text.)

Tomorrow will be the oneth anniversary of the Hadean Lands Kickstarter project. One year of this new lifestyle.

(Technically it's eleven months of this lifestyle, because I quit for Christmas. Also eleven months since I took possession of the donated money, due to processing delays and business schedules and thinking about taxes and all the other absurd things attendant on self-employment. I could also mark it as thirteen months and five days since I decided for sure to quit my industry job; thirteen months and four days since I reached my Kickstarter funding goal. But enough with the dreamy reminesce.)

IFComp is over, and it turns out I entered this year! Cold Iron placed fifteenth of 38 entries. It's a tiny little game -- so if you're hungry for Zarf IF, you can either be disappointed that it's so small or happy that it only took a few days of my time to write. But I think it's pretty good, and reviewers seem happy with the quality of work (if not the quantity).

But there's more to the story than that. I collaborated with three other Boston IF authors to create a secret, cross-game bonus puzzle.

The idea was originally suggested by Kevin Jackson-Mead at a PR-IF meetup. He thought it would be cool if several of us entered IFComp with games that shared a metapuzzle. We talked over ideas, and then I wrote a small puzzle structure and passed it around. I set it up to fit into four games. Doug Orleans and Mike Hilborn volunteered to handle the other two parts, and we charged off on our quest.

Last week, I wrote:

In other news -- or rather, the news I started with: Meanwhile has been sent off to App Store review. If nothing goes wrong, it will be available Tuesday, November 8th...

Nothing went wrong, and so Meanwhile is available, right now, in your local iOS App Store.

Full press release is below the cut.

And Hadean Lands? It's on my "make progress every day" list now. I should have the puzzle structure completely outlined by the end of this week. That's a small step, but comforting to me.

A week ago I tweeted: "With Meanwhile stable, my Next Damn Project Slot is open as of Monday. And that means Hadean Lands (aka the Previous Damn Project)."

Perhaps you read that with a detached, urbanely ironic skepticism. Or not. Maybe Twitter can't tolerate that much irony. Who knows. Anyhow, last Monday, I opened up my HL design notes file. I brushed the dust and dinosaur vertebrae off it and read through. Here's what I quickly realized:

Two months ago (gad!) I said:

After I ship Hideout, I will be concentrating on [Secret Project] M37, because it too is just about finished. (And the paperwork is just about settled...) Even though M37 isn't IF either, I promise you will be excited and you will understand why I made time for it this past spring.

My Secret Hideout shipped last month, and the secret project remained secret. Because sometimes it really does take a month for the last contract details and then another month to get all the paper signed. So it flows. But now it is October, and I can finally say...

Meanwhile for iOS will be released this fall. It is a collaboration between Jason Shiga (the author of Meanwhile) and myself. And it will be awesome.

(Footnote: these are production screenshots. There will be some changes before release, particularly in the buttons.)

I am delighted to say that My Secret Hideout -- first mentioned here a couple of weeks ago -- is available right now on the App Store. Runs on iPad and iPad 2 (iOS 4.2 or later).

Really, it's been available for most of a day -- in some time zones. You may not know this, but Apple treats its App Store as a separate store for each country (or a bunch of countries, anyhow). Apps appear in a given store at midnight in that store's time zone. So from my point of view, My Secret Hideout was released to the New Zealand App Store at 8 AM on Monday. It's been cruising across the hemispheres all day, and it just hit the US a few minutes ago. (Maybe up to an hour. Don't worry, you can get it even if you live in California.)

The down side is, I don't have any sales reports yet, so I don't know how it's doing. But the up side is that I don't have to figure out tax compliance in 90 countries.

I'm glad I don't have to organize everything, is what I'm saying.

No; strike that. What I'm saying is:

My Secret Hideout is a wacky, creative thing set in a treehouse. It’s not like any app you’ve seen before. Buy it! Play around with it!

My Secret Hideout has no goal, no score, no trophies. Explore it, or play with it, until you find a result you like. Will your treehouse be simple or complex? Can you guide it? What will you discover inside?

That's the blurb. There's the link. Go for it.

And as always, please rate the app if you try it out. Ratings are what keep the sales going, and income is what keeps me going. (I mean, yes, the hacking and the laughs are what keep me going -- but also the income.)

Thank you for your continued generosity. More project news soon.

Introducing My Secret Hideout -- my first iPad app release. Coming soon!

I already mentioned this on Twitter and then (welcome to the new world) my Google+ stream. But you folks signed up for news, and news I owe you. So here's a little more detail.

Many people have asked me -- that is, I have been asked -- that is, Jmac asked me last weekend -- anyway, this iOS software patent situation. What do I think?

Jeremie Lariviere steps forward to ask for an update. Okay, fair enough.

I let this update slip late, because I hoped I would have a Secret Project to announce. But legal paperwork takes however long some other lawyers think... Hang on. Wait. That's what I wrote six weeks ago. It's still true. Dammit.

There has been progress, however, in that the party of the third part has sent a contract draft back to the party of the second part, whose lawyers are now looking it over, and will send a draft back to the party of the first part, who is me, and then my lawyers will look it over, and -- you get the idea. That's just how it has to work. When we all converge and the contracts are signed, I will have big announcement.

But that is not Hadean Lands news. I'm afraid that work on this secret thing -- and, subsequently, stress in waiting for legal work on this secret thing -- has contributed to June being "not IF month" for me. I have gotten some work done on a different secret project, purely out of compulsive fiddling. (If you've been following my Twitter messages, you have a hint of where that started. But not where it's going.)

So the plan is that July will put IF back at the top of my priority list. Of course the secret project will (I hope) uncork during July, so then I'll be juggling two things at the top of my list. But that's normal for me. I've been doing that every month since January, it's just that which items are on top keep shifting. I have milestones for July, but I hate announcing milestones, so you'll have to wait until the next update to see how I'm doing on them (or not). Sorry.

I did finally get the new computer I promised myself in December. So that's progress, although only indirectly.

In other catch-up news: Balticon was great but I only wound up doing one IF event. So it was. I am not going to be at Readercon this year (I gave an IF talk there last year, which was nice, but doesn't need to be annual). I expect to drop in on Mysterium, which is a tiny Myst fan convention in town, but that's just for fun. And not until August anyhow.

I let this update slip late, because I hoped I would have a Secret Project to announce. But legal paperwork takes however long some other lawyers think it will take, and so it is still Secret. Sorry! Hopefully soon.

What can I report? Well, I have made substantial progress on the iPhone interpreter. It is now capable of playing a Glulx game. It's not pretty or polished, but it runs. I've also started adapting a Z-code virtual machine to the same interface, so that I can release my old games (and the Hadean Lands teaser!) with the same iOS packaging. (To be technical, I'm working on a Glk interface port of the Fizmo interpreter. Did you want me to be technical? No? Well, there you are.)

Now, this interpreter work isn't ground-breaking. In fact iPhone Frotz can do all this already. But this will be my code base for future improvements, so it's important to have it all down solid. Which it isn't yet, mind you. Solid. Yet.

But games run. That's always an exciting milestone.

Speaking of running games, I released a game last week! A very small game: The Matter of the Monster. It's not classic IF. It's a sort of choose-your-own-adventure experiment; I used the Undum Javascript toolkit. I tweaked it a bit, though. Try the game -- it'll take you about ten minutes -- and you'll see what I mean.

(Thanks to Jacq's Indigo New Language Challenge for spurring me into this.)

Finally, I'll remind you that I'll be at Balticon in two weeks. (That's in Baltimore, May 27-30.) I'll be on a couple of IF panels and talks... sometime that weekend. They don't seem to have a schedule up yet. Stay tuned, as they say, space fans.

I am not at GDC right now (although Emily Short is, and many other game designers I know or know of). Drat.

But if you're the sort of person who wants to meet me in person, you can visit the IF events at PAX East, March 11-13. I've already posted about that, so there you go.

Moving on beyond PAX (hard as it is for me to think about that): I am speaking at Swarthmore College on Saturday, March 26th. (In the afternoon sometime -- not yet determined.) I will be talking about IF for writers, and also doing a very fast introduction to Inform 7. Then in the evening we'll have a group IF play event. Thanks to Swarthmore Psi Phi for inviting me.

And finally -- well, finally for this update -- I will be attending Balticon, May 27-30. I haven't seen the final schedule, but I believe I'm doing the IF-for-writers talk again, moderating an IF panel, and hosting a group play of Heliopause.

A month has gone by, and it's time for a progress update.

(Clever people will note that there's no causal connection between the halves of that sentence.)

The obvious question is, how is Hadean Lands doing? You might be following my "Progress" tweets, in which I have been bragging about IF API spec updates and interpreter releases and iPhone framework code and business purchases and blog posts, but not a word about Hadean Lands.

Fear not. HL work is getting done. But if I were tweeting about it, you'd see a lot of "Had idea." "Had idea." "Thought about how ideas fit together." "Had idea." "Picked some ideas off the list. Put them on another list."

I'm not going to be posting week-by-week status updates here. (For that, read my "progress" tweets on @zarfeblong.) But you get one special one tonight. The new year has reached its Mondayness, so you're probably wondering if I am officially In Gear.

Answer: yes. I spent the end of December more on slacking than designing. That phase is over. Here's what the beginning of January has looked like:

• I made some improvements to the profiling code of my Glulxe interpreter. (Graham Nelson wants to work on optimizing his Inform 7 compiler, and he asked me for some features to aid measurement.)

• I fired up XCode and started a new iOS project. This is an audio toy, not an IF interpreter. I need to remind myself how ObjC works before I start anything serious. (After two evenings of work, it displays a button and beeps continuously. No, this is not Boodler... yet.)

• I filed to create Zarfhome Software Consulting, LLC. This is exciting! The last time I tried to start a business was 1997, and I never got beyond a name and logo. Now I have a Federal Employee Identification Number!

• I tried to set up a business bank account, but failed because I didn't have the LLC form printed out. I'll go back there tomorrow. In the meantime, I bought a printer to print the form, so that's some progress.

• I spent a couple of hours futzing around with a programmable LED badge (available in the hardware-shovelware aisle of your local MicroCenter!) (Where I went to get the printer.) I got this Linux driver compiled on my Mac -- jury-rigged to a trial, but it worked. Once. Now the USB library won't recognize the device. Oh well. No, this has nothing to do with Hadean Lands, but I am revelling in my freedom or some such.

• I withdrew $28699 from Amazon Payments. (To my personal bank account, yeah, whatever, this is what accountants are for.) $28699 is what $31337 looks like after Kickstarter and Amazon take their cuts.

• I wrote down more design notes for Hadean Lands. This is the phase I am in, and will be for a while -- alternately write down ideas and stare at them. I will do this every day. Eventually the ideas will start fitting together. It's not fast but it's the way it has to work. (I'll know it's done when I start wailing "Oh, woe, all the coolness has leaked out of this project and my design is completely lame." Then I can start coding!) (Yes, this really is the way it always goes.)

• A little bit of slacking anyway. Of course.

Expect more of the same in the weeks to come.

Aaron Reed's recent book Creating Interactive Fiction with Inform 7 opens with this quote:

All around him, the Machines' fleet and orbital stations are blasting away at his tree ships, burning the mighty trunks like firewood.
(-- from The Duel That Spanned the Ages by Oliver Ullmann)

Aaron goes on to describe the development work that this scene would require in a triple-A, commercial, graphical game. Concept artists, modellers, texture artists, animators, sound designers, probably a musician, and programmers to pull it all together. You know the drill.

"As IF, all the author had to do was write those twenty-two words," Aaron notes.

(Note: Cuba is metaphorical. I am not going to Cuba. Brush up on your famous movie quotes.)

There we have it; just over $31,000 dollars. (I won't say exactly how much over, but I know who you are.)

Thank you all. To those of you who thanked me, you're welcome. To the rest of you, happy holidays, and if you don't celebrate any near-term holidays -- go invent one. We'll wait. We're not proud. ("Or tired.")

In one sense, the hard part is now over. I can put aside my fundraiser's hat, which (trust me) doesn't fit my head at all. I can go back to designing games and writing code. That's all I've ever wanted, mostly.

In another sense, the easy part is now over. I'm no longer watching money roll in with the tide; now I have to row out and earn it. I owe you people thirty-one thousand dollars' worth of game. Time to get crunching.

And now, some questions from the audience!

Here we are, with 6.9-ish days to go. I've just passed 600 backers and 26,000 dollars. Those numbers mean nothing to my brain, of course. I can't picture a pile of 10,800 overpriced muffins. I can imagine six squares of people standing ten-by-ten, but I don't know what it would sound like if they all cheered at once.

This whole experience has been a little unreal, is what I'm trying to tell you.

I took this past weekend (the US holiday) as a bit of a dry run. I spent one day eating (that's the holiday), and then three solid days working on IF work. Not the game design, not yet. I answered email, and then did an extraordinarily dull bit of interpreter coding needed for full Unicode support. (Do you know what "Normalization Form D" is? No? Lucky rotter.) This is what my life will be like come January. Overall, a success. I have leftovers, too.

Kickstarter projects traditionally start with a big burst of love, then slow down for a long while, and then rush towards the finish line at the end. I suppose it's different for projects that cross the finish line so early. Nonetheless, and naturally, I'm hoping for a big clutch of last-minute donations. Not because I'm greedy, right? This is fundraising. I'm not allowed to shirk it, because the funds will help me. You know this spiel. So here's my last fundraising plea:

The Hadean Lands story flew around the gamer press right away. Everything since then has been word of mouth. Fantastic, enthusiastic, helpful word of mouth -- but inevitably low-volume word of mouth. I've pushed the story at some of the literary, science-fiction, and fandom news sites, but it hasn't grabbed. Nor is it much of a business story, except for that one (very gratifying) blog repost on CNNMoney.

Therefore: if you think that IF is cool, mention me to your non-gamer friends. I think this project has the potential to reach book-readers, e-book-readers, watchers of smart TV, followers of online narrative projects -- the border between old and new media. Who do you know?

Yes, it's early. I'll come around when the game is released, and try to reach the same people all over again. But that's the future, and this is the last Kickstarter week, so now is when I'm asking.

Whew. Plea ends. Thank you for all you people have done.