…And thank God the Christmas season is over, I don’t think my internal organs can take any more excess.

Despite cheerfully departing work on the 21st with grand intentions, it may come as a surprise to no-one that very little work went on over the Christmas period. Not to mention, far too much eating and drinking. We start the working year today as bejumpered huddles, with bags under our eyes, various viruses in various stages of incubation, and withdrawal symptoms from all the things we have vowed to give up this year.

That said, we have grand plans ahead! 2013 will be the year of Total Monkery World Domination. (Muahaha!) The current master plan, as given my our grand leader, is: “Work our tits off.” I may post the extended attack plan later in the week.

But for now, I do hope that everyone’s Christmas and New Year’s Eve celebrations were joyful, and that those of you who are back to work today are in a better state than I! Anyone got any good New Year’s Resolutions?

Christmas is nearly upon us, and Richard’s easing up on the Mystery Project. This is happy news indeed for Iliara, as Richard is now a bit more free to fix bugs, make things shiny, help out with the port and even make levels. Muttering all the while about being a CEO and above this, of course.

Anyway, this has resulted in progress of the kind that sometimes feels a bit like not-progress – some show-stoppers have been eliminated, but there are plenty of knock-on bugs to iron out. Our first exciting supermega (pre-alpha) DEMO is nearly done though! If it can ever escape from under the weight of the combined perfectionism in the TM office… I have trouble letting a blog post into the wild, let alone the game.

Thankfully, we take turns reining each other in. And mocking. Ahh, teamwork!

As for Christmas plans, The office will probably be quiet from the 21st to the 2nd. Richard never stops, though, so when I say quiet what I mean is blasting psychedelic trance at all hours. We also have an official TM Christmas Party/Family Outing (ahh, family businesses) on the 21st. And in the new year – demos, new projects, cashflow, and eventually the chance to talk about the SEKRIT PROJECT!

I can’t wait. :)

Oh and I know I promised naked ladies with kittens on Facebook… so I have lazily photoshopped a santa hat and snow into the top Google result for “kittens and boobs”. Enjoy!

Anya Trounce, arteeste. Why yes, my services are available!

Total Monkery returns! It’s good to be home. Our Travelodge? Not the best…

TM have brought shame upon our good names by being total failures at partying, I must say. We left the TIGA After Party before it had really begun and went to bed, and left Bath for home comforts before the Edge Quiz had even started. I did get a bit involved in the daytime fun, namely Joust and the paragliding sim, which apparently I was playing (atrociously) when there was a camera trained upon it. Erk.

Talks I enjoyed:

Undoubtedly the Dear Esther keynote on Thursday was the highlight for me; don’t think there was anyone in the room who didn’t do a little internal cheer when we got to the Steam sales figures. Though it’s obviously dangerous to be comforted or excited by the Dear Esther story – for every success story there are probably a hundred invisible failures – you can’t help feeling just a little bit less afraid to try.

Aside from that, I enjoyed the panel on Accessibility. I’m not unaware of Accessibility in other areas, but I’d never really thought about it for games. I’m massively annoyed that I didn’t write down the websites with the guidelines on…

Then on Friday, I LOVED The Neverending Story panel, though that’s not a surprise. My first love was fiction, I read and read and read, and then when I was fourteen I wrote some spectacularly bad Mary-Sue fanfiction and got hooked. After that I wrote and wrote and wrote and read about writing and wrote about writing and then I read some more, and it was only that damned interfering Real Life that stopped me. So I love writing, and I really love writers. Could’ve listened for hours.

I liked hearing about a lot of the design stuff that came up throughout the whole conference, such as the idea of ‘gunfeel’ in the Edge panel… great word. Some great stuff in Creating Games with Character, too; Total Monkery as a whole got our pens and iPads out to write down the workflow advice. We’re still figuring out how to work and what each of us needs and wants and all that complicated new business stuff, but we’ve had plenty to think about this weekend and I think Monday will be a busy one.

Oh, and the Cultural Exchange talk was cool. Weirdly enough, it occurred to me in that talk that nearly all my favourite games are Japanese… although I’ve never consciously sought Japanese games out. Not sure of the significance of this. Will was wondering, however… since there are most definitely gamers out there who will seek out games specifically because they are Japanese… what’s it like for Japan? How big is the niche of Japanese people with an obsession with the West? Anyone know?

And of course, I can’t go without mentioning Oscar Clark’s talk, entitled Finding Love in the Zombie (Freemium) Apocalypse, which has given us much food for thought.

We’re all various degrees of Not Very Happy about freemium, on my part because I can’t think of a freemium model game where the freemium element didn’t on some level annoy me… but it does have some selling points. The biggest one being that persuading people they should pay money for our game may well be hard going – no-one knows yet how damn awesome we are and how much we’d like to pay our rent, please. But also, Iliara has a LOT of features at this point. More than we know what to do with. I’m pretty sure that there’s some sort of freemium model for Iliara that doesn’t give us the willies… we just need to think of it.

So this will be the primary topic of our Monday afternoon meeting, which will be interesting as my mouth will be numb from having teeth out. Watch this space for what we conclude!

Today Will and I got chocolate for being good minions. Today was a good day.

…aaand I never thought I’d say that about a day that started out with a maths lesson. Richard has been giving us little trigonometry refreshers in the mornings for the past few days. There was a whiteboard and everything. Richard looked all teachery. It was… actually very cool.

My head is feeling rather heavy at the moment from the weight of all the new things I am trying to learn. It would help if I wasn’t trying to learn everything ever in the tiny space of time I can conceive of, like the crazy impatient person I am. Over the last couple weeks I have been on what amounts to a self-taught crash course in CSS, the results of which are a new Iliara website which looks reasonably shiny and works pretty well… assuming you don’t have IE8 or an iPad 1, and assuming you don’t mind it being jerky and buggy on various other mobile and tablet platforms. Tomorrow, I will fix it. Today, I can never look at another line of CSS again.

Will is responsible for the floaty JavaScript Iliara header, btw. I made a vow to stick to learning one thing at a time, and consequently know nothing about JavaScript myself. However, once the website is functioning okay on most things I may start learning a bit in my spare time, so I can swap out the crazy experimental CSS I’ve got for some slightly more reliable scripts. Although it will then be inherently less awesome IMHO.

Also, with my new skills I will be constructing a startlingly beautiful new Total Monkery website. But that will be a loooong term project.

I have also been doing other learnings this afternoon; I am trying to learn 3D modelling, specifically with Blender. So far I have made a shiny lilac house. It makes me very happy. The idea of making anything more complicated than a shiny lilac house makes my head hurt.

Anyway, enough about me. Will has been, when not writing bits of JavaScript and dealing with me and my “Please help me!”/”GO AWAY!” attitude to web development (or life), making increasingly sadistic Iliara levels. And increasingly sadistic lists of things I need to create art for. After tomorrow, I will be doing that. Among other things. Oh, so many other things.

Richard has been working on the Sekrit Project. It’s not a very Sekrit Sekrit Project, but there’s will also be an official announcementy type thing about it at some point, so I shall leave it a mystery for now. Richard has also been finding the time to be fixing Iliara bugs aplenty, and I now have fireflies, yay! Fireflies are my pet Iliara feature and I shall love them forever.

We are collectively, with various exciting comrades and allies, looking at various other projects, which will all be talked about in due course. They are all damn cool, but I think everything Total Monkery is damn cool. ;)

Mother/Andrea has purchased us badges, stickers and business cards! I have mentioned the business cards arriving, I know. Apparently handing them out to my friends and strangers and announcing that they make me an official grown-up is not the done thing. I maintain that I am merely voicing the secret thought of every young professional who has ever had cause to obtain a business card.

The stickers and badges, however, came last week. We managed, through various on- and offline discussions, to decide upon designs for the badges, but sadly they haven’t been set very well… The sticker is more of a success although a lot darker than the on-screen version. Still, they are cool, and we have already joyfully handed some out to select friends and family. At ExPlay we will be a bit more free, and by a bit more free I mean sneaking up on unsuspecting strangers and sticking them onto their most accessible appendage.

Now, as it says on my business card, I am an artist, so I think I’m going to spend some time doing the one thing I haven’t been doing much of these past few weeks. I’m going to go draw something. Adios!

I’m so excited. We all got BUSINESS CARDS today. GROWNUPS have business cards.

I’m a bit annoyed with them because the gradient came out quite significantly darker than it did on my screen and on my printed copy, but they were also probably even cheaper than making them yourself, so can’t complain. When we’re wildly successful I want ones shaped like a bunch of bananas. Possibly that smell of banana. That would be awesome. Or just have our name printed on bags of foam bananas. Everyone loves you if you hand out sweets, as I learnt in primary school.

Wooo! I’m official!

Anyway, Iliara levels are always and forever being built, but I am, for the most part, continuing my crash course in CSS via the Iliara website. It’s still fun, although my God, can CSS be annoying sometimes. Anyway, once I’ve done that I will most definitely be moving on to making a custom theme for the TM website, although that will probably be a side project for when other jobs are driving me mad. Soon, I’m sure, Iliara will be Unityfied. It’s going to look sooo pretty. Also, be fun.

Speaking of fun, looking forward to ExPlay in Bath… although we’re all going up on Wednesday. Which is HALLOWEEN. Which is my FAVOURITE HOLIDAY. Nothing beats the Holiday of Sweets, Slutty Outfits and Being Scared, and I won’t be able to combine them into some sort of super awesome party! Sad times.

Of course, if anyone knows what delights Bath holds on Halloween night, do drop us a line. ;)