Game Recommendation: "Cinders"

I was home sick from work today, so I took the opportunity to download the demo for a game that's been getting some buzz on my Tumblr dashboard: "Cinders".

This game is totally charming, a fun reworking of the Cinderella story where the main character has much more spirit and agency than the traditional heroine. The stepmother and stepsisters also get meatier roles (and, depending on how you play it, more sympathetic). It’s described as a “visual novel”, and that’s very apt — the game is really an interactive story, where various key decisions shape the direction of the plot, and small choices can drastically alter the outcome. The lead character is great, there are lots of interesting women characters with varied personalities and motivations, and the artwork is simply beautiful:

If any of the above is appealing to you at all, I definitely recommend you check it out — the aforementioned free demo totally sucked me in, and I played the game twice today, plus going back to check out a couple of branch points. If you do give it a shot, let me know what you think!

July update; August goals

Days written: 24/31
Words written: 20,975
Words of fic written: 10,513
Stories worked on: Six, and several ficbits
Stories posted: Three (finished one published WIP!), plus seven ficbits over three days.

( Chart takes the gold )

Goals:

1. Write an average of six days per week. Not quite, and I had to count working on the character development meme as "writing" to even get close.

2. Finish character development interview. (And post?) It's done, and it was an interesting exercise -- I've already used some of the ideas I came up with there to inform stories and the 30 Days of Alistair Meme that's going around Tumblr (more about that in a separate post soon), but I'm undecided whether I'm going to clean it up for posting anywhere. Might not be worth the time it would take to polish it for the slight interest other people might have in it.

3. Finish and post last chapter of Separation of Powers Done!! :D

4. Work on Wardens of Ivalice and Science Bros. I poked at Wardens of Ivalice a little, and have a rough draft of the Avengers fic (which isn't really a Science Bros story anymore, I'm afraid).

Considering the Olympics, some health issues at the beginning and end of the month, and the start of a busy new quarter, I didn't do too badly here. But if I'm going to keep up with the "writing six days a week" thing, I need to prioritize it better.

Goals for August:

1. Write an average of six days per week (really).

2. Finish and post the Science Bros Everyone Moves Into Stark Tower fic.

3. Make serious progress on Wardens of Ivalice, whether that means writing or hammering out the background/meta issues that I've left hanging for several months now.

4. Start work on my dragonagebb story... oh yeah. I haven't really talked about that here, have I? Yeah, I've signed up for the Dragon Age Big Bang. Which I'm also kinda sorta helping to mod. >.> And I totally meant to advertise here, but I felt a little weird about that because of not running Mega Flare this year (and I hope you all already knew that from the announcement on the community, because otherwise this is a pretty awkward way to find out... big major apologies if so).

Anyway, I am signed up for the second wave of the Dragon Age Big Bang (signups open through the end of September! Artist signups for both waves still open!), and I haven't written a word yet, or even completely decided what my story is going to be, so I should get on that. Yeah.