A deal’s a deal! This afternoon three forums and a reddit subforum all came online. Please check them out, register for any you like, and join in the conversation. If you’re wondering what to talk about, why not start with the Captain Jameson Alpha? I’d love to hear about bugs, suggestions, and stories from the final frontier. All players should find themselves exploring the same map, so it might be helpful to start sharing route tips and mapping data. If you get stuck in the game it might also be a good place to ask for help.

Since Jameson is still in alpha I wasn’t comfortable posting it in the main site menu, but you can find it tucked away in the community page as CJALPHA.BAT.

Enjoy!

<3 Farbs

Hi folks,

I have a proposition for you. I hope you like it, because otherwise I’ll feel like a bit of goose. Here’s the deal:

If you¹ create a Captain Forever forum², I’ll release³ the Captain Jameson alpha⁴.

• ¹By “you” I mean the community. Anyone. Possibly several people. Ideally multiple forums will emerge. If you want to build a forum then don’t let the efforts of others disuade you!
• ²The forum must be dedicated to or at least heavily feature the Captain Forever games. This would be a place for players to find release notes and announcements, trade mapping and exploration notes, post feedback about the games, and generally hang out.
• ³The alpha build will be released for play by all Captain Forever supporters, ideally within 24 hours of me being notified about the first forum, but possibly up to a week later if I encounter unforseen technical disasters.
• ⁴The alpha is an incomplete version of the game Captain Jameson. This means that it may be missing some features of and contain more bugs than the final version. You will have the opportunity to play the game before it is complete, and help fine-tune it. I still plan to finish and release the game, regardless of the presence of an alpha build.

I’m very excited about sharing this game with you, but I really need there to be somewhere for everyone to discuss it first. I hope someone out there can summon up the pony to pony up and get this pony (forum) on the road.

<3
Farbs

As promised last post, I’ve been building a replacement menu system for Captain Jameson. I’m not finished yet, but I think it already communicates its use and evokes both the NASA MEDS systems and the mainframe and BBS interfaces of times gone by. I wasn’t actually online during the BBS era but I’ve had a blast learning about figlets and sysops and FBI raids. Hopefully I’ll sneak some of this into the gameworld.

I’m nearly ready to resume testing on squishy humans, which is lucky since the PAX10 deadline is only a few weeks away. Hopefully these tests will see more players break through the shell (pun intended) and into the game.

In other news I’ve created a @CaptainForever twitter account for 280-byte-sized Captain Forever updates. This blog will remain as active as ever, but the twitter account might see a few updates too.

What do you think of the new menu?

<3 Farbs