Wasn't too thrilled with Feather at first, but feather suggests quill, which suggests old-fashioned writing, which suggests Shakespeare. Obvious, really, when you think about it.

Last time I got criticised for not having any music, so this time I decided to start with the music. Found some nice Elizabethan-style midi files, and added a nifty system to Albow for managing a playlist and switching between songs smoothly.

All I need now is a game to go with it...

I'm going for random content generation this time. So far I can generate a floor with rooms and doorways (although no doors to go in them yet), place items, move a player around and pick them up.

I also have code working for picking random excerpts from Shakespeare's plays, for later use in the cunning plan that I don't have time to write about because I'm too busy implementing it.

Optimistically, I think I'm about half way to having a game.

Didn't get much time for it today, due to unwelcome distractions such as work. Made some progress, though. Can now generate folios with missing pages and select items from inventory. Have started on a folio management interface.

Folio management is done, game ending condition detected. Can play a complete game now, although it's a rather spartan experience.

Found an appropriate font and added some sound effects when picking up objects.

Added carpets to rooms. Still need furniture.

Half way through adding stairs between floors.

Still need enemies, and a reason to use the quills and ink. And, of course, weasels, although we'll have to see about that.

Enemy placement and battles are implemented. Downloaded more plays.

Made the room generation algorithm suck slightly less, although it's still not great, and there still isn't any furniture. May not get time for that. My todo list has about 2 weeks of work on it. :-(

Weasels are looking unlikely.

Well, I've made more progress than I expected. Rewriting of torn pages is working well, and I've created intro and credit screens and a nifty context-sensitive help system.

At the last minute I decided to hack up an automatic character image generation system so that I wouldn't have to draw about a hundred character icons by hand. While trying to test that I've discovered some nasty bugs in the floor layout algorithm, such as a propensity to put two staircases right next to each other so that you can get from the first floor to the third floor but can't get off at the second floor. :-(

Hope I'll be able to fix that up tomorrow morning.

Weasels are looking very unlikely at this point.

I switched on this morning and found that my monitor wasn't working -- a problem I can do without just before a pyweek deadline! Fortunately I had an alternative monitor available to keep me going.

It seems to have finally come together well enough for a release. The stair placement problem seems to be fixed, and the character image generator is working more or less as intended.

However, the floor generation algorithm still isn't quite right -- I think sometimes it generates insoluble maps, with an enemy blocking access to an item needed to defeat it, or maybe it's just not placing the item at all. So for the time being, if you get stuck you'll just have to start a new game and hope for a better outcome.

As always, there are numerous things I didn't get time for -- furniture, better carpet placement, locked doors and cupboards... weasels...

What I thought was an insoluble-level bug turned out to be a false alarm. (I'd forgotten that Reynaldo was a character in Hamlet and didn't think to try the right page on him.)

It's been pointed out that Linux needs timidity in order to handle MIDI. This affects HIIW too, since it also uses MIDI music. I've tried to arrange things so that it will continue working without music if support isn't there, but I haven't tested that.