It has been a while since I've written anything on the blog. The things I was working on weren't particularly interesting. Other things were requiring a lot of my attention. The things I do want to talk about still aren't completed.

Occasionally over the years I have done contract work to help fund the development of Miranda. I hoped that Early Access would put an end to that, but in December it came time to do that again, so I accepted a contract with an awesome group of developers who I've been working with these last few months.

Part of the arrangement is that I can continue to work on Miranda. So on January 26 The Combat Update went live.

Then COVID hit, and national economies started to collapse, and there were riots, and I found myself struggling to find the motivation to do anything beyond watch the news and worry, even as things in Canada have actually gone pretty well. That has gone on for a while now.

In August for a bit of a fun break on my summer vacation I started work on Space Mines III, a remake of a game I made on my Ohio Scientific Superboard II PC when I was a teenager. That has been such fun and a great change of pace for me and proves that the Lair Engine isn't just a one-game game engine. I did the first audio pass this week, and the pew-pew retro sound effects totally bring it to life.

Since The Combat Update I've done five minor releases of Miranda with bugfixes and small improvements nobody is likely to notice. I've also done a bunch of library upgrades, and an x64 port of the server and (most of) the client. Secret Lair Games' non-game servers also got a bunch of improvements, updates and fixes because they were having some problems.

So what's coming up with Miranda? In short, I've been working on some stuff, I'm not really sure yet, but I've been thinking about it a lot.

I hope you are well,

Rob.