The Case of The Disappearing AIF Author

So for those of you wondering, I am still alive...although barely.

I've always been among those who restlessly await the coming of a new AIF game with bated breath, daily following blogs for development info and updates, watching the different forums and boards with a keen eye.  So I understand how frustrating it can be for someone to hint at an almost finished new game...and then nothing for two whole months.  But I do have an extremely good reason.

Over two months ago, my car got t-boned by a drunk driver when I was driving home from work.  Thankfully, my car's side impact airbags deployed and I survived the crash with my arm broken in three places, my leg broken in two and a brain injury my doctors quaintly described as 'slightly traumatic.'  I was in a coma for about a week and a half afterwards while doctors closely monitored my brain and made sure I wasn't going to die.  I woke up with no memory of the day of the crash and with a few fine motor control issues that I've been going through PT to help repair.  It's been slow going and I haven't had much energy or willpower to do anything other than sleep, eat and do physical therapy since then. 

And I was the lucky one.  The drunk driver who hit me never even made it to the hospital.

Needless to say, the whole experience has been life changing for me, and I've been struggling with some changes and reevaluating choices I've made in my life (a big one being that I've decided to completely cut alcohol out of my caloric intake completely).  Somethings have become more important to me, while others have lost a bit of their focus.  The good news is that none of these changes have affected my desire to finish and release this game, or my plans to do more games in the future.

Moving onto the more cheery part of the blog post.  Over the past couple of days, I've been slowly working (I can only type one-handed at the moment) on some of the changes my first round beta-testers suggested, smoothing over some rough patches, adding a couple new features, and fixing many, many, many spelling errors.  My goal for the next couple of days is to finish that up and open up a second round of beta testing to help complete the game even further.  I won't make any predictions after that for a release, but I will keep working on it as I am able.

So, hopefully you all understand why I haven't released the game as quickly as I wanted to, but I also hope you're still excited for my first game.

Yours,
Minterlint