Milestones Along the Open Road

Despite the dust on this blog, a lot has been happening as I stumble towards the end of 2021. here are a couple of key milestones down and a couple still to come.

Milestone Minor: Migri

We had some good news in October: the Finnish immigration service (known universally as Migri) finally processed our post-Brexit residency application. They even approved it, so we are free and clear to spend the next five years here.

This takes a huge load off my mind. I probably should not have worried about it. My wife has a job, I have my studies, and to the best of my knowledge the children are not notorious international jewel thieves. But I have heard so many immigration horror stories from the United States and the United Kingdom that Migri was unfairly tarred with the scary bureaucracy brush.

No worries, though. We can live our lives. I still want to become a Finnish citizen, getting my EU citizenship back in the process, but those are milestones for another day.

Milestone Major: Indomitable

Way back at the end of last year, I teased a game project in progress. I wasn’t ready to talk about it yet. And I kind of still am not ready to talk about it. But it’s a rogue-like science fiction deck building game, and I’m calling it Indomitable.

Ten months after I first teased it, Indomitable is still very much a work in progress. However, I did put up the 50th build on itch.io a couple of weeks ago. This is the first true alpha of the game. Lots of bugs and improvements still to make, but the key features are all in. Over the next couple of months I’m going to be building out the narrative content and — hopefully — writing a lot about the world and story of the game on its website.

Milestones Still Ahead

Before I turn my full attention to finishing Indomitable, though, I have a thesis that also needs to be finished. I’ve spent months ignoring my thesis and programming game features; it’s time to refocus. The good news is that yesterday afternoon I re-read the first key chapter describing my interviews with the first generation of wargame hobbyists and and really enjoyed it. Now I just have to write an equally strong chapter about the second generation. The interview notes are all stuffed into a big 40 page document that has to be distilled down to twenty pages of a coherent historical story. In my mind at least, I have about a month to pull this off… so I’d better get to it.