The beta of Proto Sum is now up! Which means absolutely nothing to you, the reader, as practically nobody knew it existed up until this point.

So, why is this thing worthy of an exclamation mark? Proto Sum is an idea I had in May. It surfaced momentarily, then was pulled down into the La Brea Tar Pits of my mind. Preserved in time, drawn down by the gravity of my existing project, Trigaea*, which holds all other errant would-be projects in check until it is ultimately extinguished.

Or, well, not quite. The Twine Survival Guide Jam happened. And so, in the interests of keeping my sanity after working on Trigaea for so long, I pulled Proto Sum out of the pit. I delicately dusted it off like an attentive archeologist, and tried to make something of it.

I had to scope it down. The original idea was a bit ambitious. A VN / clicker based on Alter Ego ( the one by Caramel Column, not the old MS Dos game). It was going to be about robots - because with me, when isn’t it about robots?

Machines are fascinating. If aliens are the B in the A/B test that is life, then machines are the mirror in which we are reflected. With an alien, the appeal of first contact is to see something that has developed independent of human perspective. But with a machine, everything - every line of code - has some origin in human thought.

‘Yeah. But what about the game?’

Oh. Right. Well, play it for yourself. It’s got three endings, and one additional true ending. However, it is in beta. The deadline of the jam prompted me to release it a little early, when it is not as finished as I’d like (Which, for most projects, is ever).

The difficulty is set to extremely easy, because I haven’t refined the loops yet, and didn’t want any obstacles to people seeing the dialogue.

If you do play it - and I hope you do - please tell me what you think, and if there are any bugs. 

Or, really, tell me about the bugs. There will be bugs, despite my best efforts to keep everything organic out of it.

* For context, Trigaea is a very large project that also has not been mentioned anywhere - a 200k+ word interactive fiction sci-fi RPG. It's almost done, so you'll hear about it at some point.