This State of the Monkeys is split into two parts: my stroke and recovery, and the state of Monkey Business.
Stroke and Recovery
It’s no secret I had a stroke a little over a year ago. I’ve talked about it at length in other places, but here’s the capsule version: it was a 65% blockage of an artery in my brain that resulted in damage to my left temporal and right frontal lobes. The end result was some memory loss, unholy fatigue, and expressive aphasia.
My recovery is proceeding, and that’s about it. It’s slow, but it is progressing. After a year, I’m getting a lot less tired. The first two months, I was operating in roughly eight-hour blocks. I’d function semi-normally for about four or five hours, then need a three or four hour nap. After a year I can function mostly normally but my wife sometimes puts me to bed, especially on Fridays after work.
The aphasia has shown marked improvement. The first week in the hospital I couldn’t write my own name and I literally couldn’t string even a short sentence together; my nurses had to order room service the first day. By the time I got out, I could talk to my wife and hospital staff somewhat coherently, and I could text with a lot of help from autocorrect. After a year, I can more or less talk unless something triggers the aphasia. Then I stutter like Porky Pig or miss words entirely. On the upside, it hasn’t affected my coding at all.
I still have memory loss, but it seems to be stable. The weird part about it is I don’t know what I’ve forgotten. My wife has developed a mantra: “I told you last week…” I forget little stuff all the time, and it’s annoying. It isn’t anything major, but it gets to me. And sometimes I forget something minutes after thinking about it, but I know I’ve forgotten it but not the details.
That said, I can still build robots, and I can still work on Monkey Business.
Monkey Business
Our current project is an FPS game codenamed Projet Exterminateur. Your PC is tasked with exterminating hostile aliens aboard various spacecraft, starbases, and ground facilities. We’re working on a small assortment of weapons, equipment, enemies, and environments. Right now the levels will be handmade, but we plan to make some or all of them procedurally-generated. The cool thing about a project like this is it’s infinitely expandable. As we get more ideas for enemies or gear, it can be added as we go.
Eventually we may expand it into a full RPG (or more likely make an RPG sequel), but who knows if that will happen. We’ll post a roadmap probably next Monkey Monday.
In addition to the FPS we have a few back-burner projects. These aren’t high priority, but they break things up when the FPS is dragging.
Hovercraft Bumper Cars: bumper cars with hovercraft. We still need a lot of work on hovercraft stability and enemy AI, but our playtesters say it’s fun. We have a demo up.
Hovercraft Combative: we’re considering adding guns to the hovercraft game, and setting it in a near future post-apocalyptic wasteland. It will feature (among other things) independent-firing hull-mounted and turreted weapons.
Rokkit: the demo we have posted is just an engine test. The plan is to return to the inspiration and go nuts with like the mutant spawn of countless old arcade games.
Devil Monkey Knife Fight: cockfighting with monkeys, taking place in biker bars. We might add a base-building element once we get the combat straightened out.