It probably won’t come as a surprise to anyone that things are going pretty slowly here at ZLE. Used to be, I’d get referrals from the forums or from the JGE official sitelist, or occasionally from another MMO blog or JGE fansite. Nowadays, my traffic patterns to the site are predominantly google searches for people looking for “space wallpaper,” or Russian mafia spambots.
Part of that is my fault. The lack of content updates here, of course, causes people not to check back so often.
Part of that is NetDevil’s fault. The lack of content updates there, of course, cause people to go do other non-JGE things. I’ve done a couple half hearted comics over the past few weeks, but without new content to harpoon, lampoon, or praise, it’s really tough to get inspired.
In the mean time, I’ve been up to a few other things:
- “Finishing” the Orc game that everyone loves to hate. If it weren’t for my friends and guildies there, I’d be done until at least Cataclysm, if not forever.
- GlobalAgenda beta and launch. I pondered a separate post on GA but never got around to it. It’s a great foundation of a twitch shooter game. The devs chose to focus on a core feature/engine set and then launch before the laundry list of “gotta have” MMO features. I have rambled on in weeks past about why I thought ND was crazy for trying to cater to everyone, and it’s been refreshing to see another dev house do things right. The core game is fun, it’s just not very deep. Now the struggle will be expanding the content and justifying the eventual monthly sub.
- Real Life stuff like switching jobs, traveling for the new job, and digging ourselves out of snow.
- Taking a creative writing class with Mrs. Zoxe through the local university. It’s been nice to get out of the house and actually talk to people (non-coworkers) face to face.
- Having been inspired by the above bullet, I’ve also been working on my novel. It’s a sci-fi shooter. Go figure.
- Attempting to buy a new home. After ~10 years in our “starter home” in the subdivision, Mrs. Zoxe and I are moving to a 10 acre country lot. With luck, we’ll close this afternoon.
So while it’s a dead time for JGE (assuming it even still launches at this point; stranger things have happened), the timing is good for me. I’d have no hope of committing any significant time to to the game right now.
Bottom line, though, is that ZLE is going to go on the shelf until something breaks loose in the JGE world and/or Zoxe’s real empire.
It probably won’t come as a surprise to anyone that things are going pretty slowly here at ZLE. When my traffic patterns to the site are predominantly google searches for people looking for “space wallpaper,”
) Point is, there’s a helluva lot we don’t know, and it’s the nuances of a particular implementation that will make you love or hate a game.
