Back to Development

This blog has been abandoned, and for good reason: nobody reads it and it is only my personal diary. I have also have gone through yet another job change and had a kid, which makes finding time to write nonsense that noone will care about much harder. I have put my time to good use though, and I have been updating the site with the books I have read and the games I have played in my about page, and I am happy about how much I have been able to read and game lately.

The paternity leave has left me with a lot of “idle” time in my hands though, and in all that reading I finally got to Space Merchants. It was harder than it should to get my hands on it: I wanted the ebook version because one hand holds the baby and the other holds the ebook, but apparently there’s a romantic series of books that have almost the same title and that is all I could find on the Rakuten page. The audiobook was available, but I really don’t like that format. So, after a trip to Secret Kingdoms (one of Madrid best bookshops for books in English and with a full bookshelf for science fiction) I managed to order it and a week later I was walking home with it and The Left Hand of Darkness (just because it is impossible to walk out of there with just one book).

The world the book creates fascinated me, with one key idea summarising it all: at one point the protagonist is shipped to Costa Rica to slave away for a company doing unpleasant work to pay off a debt, and it gets explained to him that if Costa Rica’s budget is 3 billion dollars and change, and the company’s taxes in Costa Rica are 3 billion dollars, Costa Rica does what the company wants. The idea of corporations ruling the world (not too far from where we are right now) kind of mixed with something I have wanted to build for a long time. Back in the day we tried building a game about manipulating your memory of things, to make yourself feel better, but it was all too serious and we were very inexperienced and undriven to actually pull it off. However, ever since then I have wanted to build a less serious, the world has gone mad and reality doesn’t exist because people can choose what to remember game. You would play as one of the technicians that overwrite your memory, changing or directly erasing portions of your brain, and you get a glimpse of what a dystopic future that is. With Space Merchants I got the rest of the plot: aside from the main puzzle mechanic of overwriting brain sections, you could join a revolutionary movement that wants to change the whole of society, and that would spice up gameplay and plot. Needless to say, this is the next thing I want to build.

However, because I cannot do things in a straightforward way, the first thing I have written is a ToDo app in Rust, to track all the things I need to do. I also want to write a better diary app that I can use, and connect it to publish directly here, but that might take longer. The good thing is that my paternity leave is paused now, and by the time I am away from work again sometime in the late summer I can have the ToDo app, the diary app and a basic prototype to test out puzzle versions. It may sound ambitious, but having a kid truly means that I spend more time at home rather than going out and practicing sport, so it would be good to get back on the creative track.