Pesach starts in an hour (at least in my time zone), I hope everyone who’s been preparing is more or less prepared! (I could fall asleep standing. ) I’d like to take the time to wish a kosher Pesach for my Jewish friends, a joyous Easter for my Christian friends and a happy spring holiday for everyone else!

To mark the occasion, here is a really cute Pesach video from Israel… with robots!

I’ve been very busy with Pesach preparations, so I haven’t had time to post here… just two small pieces of news:

1. My friend Sarina has recently co-founded a band, Legionaire Now, and they have a fan interviews feature on their website. (Sign up for their newsletter to become eligible!) They picked me this week and I did my best to answer their questions. Read the interview here! It includes, among other things, autism, pizza and David Bowie

2. This also has to do with Sarina in a sense. I was just about to respond to her comment to my previous entry with “sure, my English might be ‘correct’ in the technical sense, but I always have this nagging feeling it’s not poetic enough”… I logged into my email… and I was very surprised to see an announcement from Astropoetica that they would like to run my poem I sent them (IIRC) sometime in December. It’s my first – and to date, the only -  English-language poem I submitted to any magazine, so this makes me really happy. The poem will probably be featured in the 2010 summer issue.

So I think I need to reevaluate my writing goals! In Hungarian I have been published in professional venues, and now that I’ve managed to sell multiple pieces to English-language semi-pro markets, I should really set my sights higher and submit to pro markets. My last excuse was “my English is not poetic enough”, which has just been thoroughly demolished. If it’s poetic enough to sell an actual poem, it’s definitely poetic enough for prose!

But, butbutbut, I have a brand new excuse at hand namely that I don’t have time to write. Unfortunately this is more or less true… I didn’t write any fiction or poetry in February, and in March I only had time to do scripting for Amesirun, my upcoming video game. (FYI – I moved the release date to April because of the holidays. Right now I think I could sleep for a week straight.)

I have to write more, and submit what I write. I also have two stories I want to revise, and a nonfiction piece on diversity in a recent spec fic video game (you’ll see which) that I need to finish ASAP.

I’ll also have to update this site more often, since it has started to get much more traffic lately than usual, mostly due to 1. Amesirun 2. my Linux posts. So, more Amesirun or more Linux?

This is just a quick announcement to say that my historical fantasy story The Turul Spreads its Wings will be featured in the Roar of the Crowd anthology published by Rogue Blades Entertainment. The anthology will be released in September IY”H.

The story has an Ancient Hungarian setting, so if you’re interested in that sort of fantasy, be sure to get the anthology when it comes out. I’m all new to historical fantasy, but I enjoyed writing this piece and hopefully you’ll enjoy reading it, too!

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Unfortunately I’ve written all of two stories in 2010 so far… this was one of them. But I finished a thesis and a lengthy funding proposal, so I’ve written a lot overall, but it was all nonfiction. I’ll try to write more fiction from now on, especially seeing as this was a semi-pro sale. I need to convince myself to submit to pro markets! (In Hungarian it’s not a problem. But in English, I admit I have a self-confidence issue due to not being a native speaker.) It’s also hard to write fiction when my job involves writing nonfiction, and I don’t want to do ‘more of the same’ (= writing in general) in my free time!

With all that being said, I’m now writing a nonfiction piece on a science fiction topic, but who said I had to make sense?

I have to admit it… the unwillingness to have an advertisement as my topmost update made me post a new teaser for the game. ^^;

Here is a strange symbol! (I turned off floating images because the image size is quite big this time.)

If you click on it, you can see a cryptic inscription in the top right corner. If you remember the previous teaser, that one also had similar elements… if you wait patiently, I might tell you where they come from and what they mean.

I finally had some time to try out ArtRage 3… I bought the new version with the upgrade discount when it came out, but I was just too busy to install it. Most of the time I draw stuff on my tablet PC, but I run Linux on it and that means I have to mess around with Wine to get ArtRage running (it’s worth it if you ask me). 2.5 is very stable right now, which is why I didn’t feel pressed to install 3.0 right away, even though I bought it and it was a bit more expensive than expected! I mention this because I just tried it out on my Windows desktop (easier install) and used the new watercolor emulation to produce the vertical lines seen in the image. So that was a new feature, and one I’ll be using excessively from now on, especially if I can get 3.0 working under Wine!

In other news, the game is progressing nicely, more than half of the graphics and the script has been made (I think I should also post a story teaser…). This means 40k of script so far, so there will be about 80k of script altogether. You can look forward to lots of branches, points-based scoring and more endings than you’d expect I hope I’ll manage to finish producing the assets and testing everything before Pesach!

Two of my friends want buy webhosting at Hostgator (where my site is hosted), and I realized there was an affiliate system… so you can click on my button to sign up and I get a commission.

This is mostly for my friends who asked for it, so feel free to disregard this post if you’re satisfied with your current hosting provider! But if you need a new host, click on the banner below and both of us will be happy I apologize to everyone else for the interruption.

Some of the buttons are quite surprising (there is one which advertises “American” hosting, with a flag… I guess there is a market for that!). I think this one looks nice, but I could do without the animation. Also, $4.95 does not get you the ability to have multiple domain names, you need the “Baby Croc” hosting plan if you require that, which is a bit more expensive (but not by much).

You can use the coupon code “TWITTER” to get 20% off your initial purchase and “hgc25″ to get $10 off.

My unfinished video game – a visual novel / point&click adventure hybrid – has been languishing untouched lately. I was seriously ill for a long time and now that I’ve gotten better (since January) I’ve been working very hard to catch up with work. So this meant that the game had taken a backseat… I’ve been feeling really bad about it, to the point where this was actually keeping me from working on the game!

But, but, but I think I’ve found a solution Enter NaNoRenO. This is like NaNoWriMo, but instead of writing a novel in a month, you have to make a visual novel video game in a month. From scratch. (There is also a similar event for finishing previously started games, but I don’t think I would be able to finish my original game in a month, it’s much more complex than a visual novel.)

A visual novel is reasonably straightforward to make, and I managed to come up with an idea for a game that I can hopefully finish in March. I wrote a design document (not sharing it just yet ) and calculated the amount of assets that need to be made, and I think it’s doable… though not easy. (Yes, I could just make a super short visual novel with stock art, but where would the fun be in that?)

I’ve already started working on Amesirun (working title) and there’s a bunch of stuff I managed to finish in the past 3 days. I made the core programming (quite simple, though it is a nonlinear game), wrote the first scene (quite long), and mostly finished two backgrounds.

The whole game is inspired by some concept artwork I did for Emerald Spires (my main game) several months ago, a drawing of a character I really liked, but the whole thing did not fit with the more realistic approach of Emerald Spires. So I cropped the character, who will be used as the main – and only! – character once I finish drawing the different emotions.

Amesirun will be set in the same universe as Emerald Spires, FYI. You can think of it as a teaser

Speaking of teasers, I have two images for you, a background and a (the) character. The game is set in “conceptual space”, so they are quite odd and not what you’d expect from visual novels. But I wanted to get away from realism, which led me to become completely stuck with the character art on my main game. It’s such a relief to be able to draw random outlandish things.

I made the images with ArtRage with some postprocessing using other software. They use some public domain line art from expired patents, and NASA astrophotography for the color overlay. The rest is hand-drawn.

Enjoy: