So, if you are reading this: first of all, thank you, it's a privilege to have you here , and second of all, you might be wondering where the other letters went. Well, contrary to my ordinary habits, they didn't just fizzle out into nothingness. For J and K I made this, another short sci-fi story with my favorite astronaut sprite. There's nothing to write home about, but it's pretty neat. I combined the two letters to mean "Junk + Knowledge". I did this because I saw Cam from Struthless do the same thing, and I thought I could do it similarly, as a safety net for crazy weeks in which I can't fit much development.

What about L and M though? Well, having made no fewer than ten small bitsy vignettes I felt the urge to take up programming again and make something a little bit more ambitious. So I declared the letters to mean "Lost Motivation", which was lost before, but now has been found... it made sense in my head, I promise.

Anyway, the idea is to use the remaining letters as a kind-of plan to make a bigger game. What will it be? For some time now I've been toying with the idea for the spiritual successor to Shards of Destiny. I'd call it the second instalment of the "Shards" series, which would always start with "Shards of" and would be kind of like Final Fantasy, i.e. not much in common between the individual parts, except for some core elements and the overal "feel". This part is going to be called "Shards of a Fallen Star", and it will be a back-to-the roots hybrid between the early cRPGs, such as Ultima, and the very early console RPGs, such as FF1 and DQ1-2. I want to make it as rudimentary as possible for two reasons.

1) I want to be able to finish the game in a reasonable time, before I get tired and burnt out on it, just like I did with the first Shards, and

2) I'm sick and tired of overly complicated systems in modern games, where you have 15 skill trees, crafting, a billion equipment slots... and what's the difference between a rusted sword +1 and a worn sword + 2?

So there it is. I've laid out the basic plan and started implementing the engine for my game. I'm using C#/Monogame, as I'd tinkered with it in the past, and while I'm not a fan of tEH bLoAT, Visual Studio is a decent all-in-one tool with a nice debugger, and I like C# for being super stringent with type checking when I tell it too, and otherwise as loose as I need it. Of course, OOP purists would look at my code and run away in terror, but that's their problem.

"N" will be for "Ngine", which is a bit of a stretch, but I need to have the engine somewhat functional before I do anything else, so there it is.