Friday, February 26, 1999

Well, Papyrus is receiving fewer good submissions. I really need to submit it as a market to a few more places. Hopefully, I’ll be able to do that tonight. Still, I have stories lined up for another week or so, then I’m in trouble.

I’ve concocted a fascinating little idea: writing a program that can write fiction. Starting off with a high-quality, low-variable story, and expanding it from there, I could come up with some unexpected variations on standard themes.

The Wheel of Time game is shaping up really nicely. They’re taking a rather odd perspective to it; a FPS that makes you think (offense and defense are actually balanced). They’ve done some beautiful things with the Unreal engine; the Trollocs actually look much closer to having actual arms and legs, as opposed to Half-Life‘s block-people.

Sierra‘s Middle Earth, a massively mutli-player version of Tolkien’s epic novel, has been updated lately. It’s looking much more professional now. I’m still amazed at how *big* this is gonna be; 20 screen’s worth in a room, and 20,000 rooms in the game. It looks like a solid design, in any event.

The bad news is that Sierra seems to be making a lot of unfortunate personnel decisions, asking the developers to all relocate to Seattle. I’m wary of Sierra now; they’ve made a lot of really poor decisions regarding releasing games and such.