My laptop is on its last legs. Basically, it’s a five-year-old macbook pro that I acquired on kijiji for 250 dollars at the end of January and the graphics’ card is dying. It would need a new logic board and that would cost more than double what I paid for the laptop. Macs are expensive to fix!

My games and some of my thesis writing were/are on the hard drive, but thankfully I backed everything up to Google Drive. That means that it’s much harder for me to work on my game right now because I have to be at home on my PC or bring an external hard drive everywhere and install Stencyl on all my friends’ computers. I also can’t replace my laptop until my SSHRC funding comes in..which I am told may come in as soon as the end of the month, although there’s no definite answer and the process takes a long time.

So, since this happened on Friday, I’ve made relatively little game progress: I spent Friday into Saturday building and inhabiting a giant cardboard fort (the pictures of which are up on my Instagram account on my @jekagames / @jekawrites twitter feeds) and then spent Sunday celebrating Father’s Day with a rained-out barbecue (we cooked with umbrellas but while my yard is equipped for the twenty people that were at the barbecue, my house is pretty tight quarters).

Today is also the first day of the Critical Hit incubator! So, I’m spending forty hours a week for the next ten weeks making a game about a zombie cyborg girl (grrrl) named Rosie. She’s a tattoo artist living (if you can call it that) in the big city.

I think that at this point, with two-player play implemented, my best strategy is to figure out any bugs that crash the game or make it unplayable (now knowing that the game may have been crashing because of my graphics card and not because of a bug) , continue to playtest with people to tweak rules/timing, and to write my postmortem. I am happy, if not totally satisfied, with the results of the game, especially when coupled with the scuba equipment. I guess that maybe I should make up an alternate list of things that you need to play the game to make it awkward? Maybe the neoprene gloves and scuba mask can be substituted for winter gloves and ski goggles, or something like that. I’ll think about it. All in all, other than the playtesting for bugs and, you know, to hear opinions of the game, Nitrogen Narcosis feels complete!