As promised on Twitter earlier today, I have recorded and uploaded several videos of the SE:SS's new combat mode. There are three videos, each of a fight with a Gloptian cruiser. The player's ship is armed with a number of powerful nuclear missiles to even the odds - out of the box, it has very little chance against the cruiser.

In the first two videos I'm doing my best to fight the cruiser with all my skill and defeat it each time, sometimes narrowly. In the final video I intentionally use bad tactics for fighting against a ship of this type and lose as a result.

While recording, I took care to always use the mouse to issue all commands. Nearly everything in the combat mode can also be done by keyboard, by pressing the key underlined in the option you want, and I'd recommend playing the game that way - but using the mouse made it clearer what was going on. Please blame the sometimes erratic movements of the cursor on my still-damaged wrists.

Because I was showing off the combat mode's features, I did everything more slowly than necessary, and spent a lot of time talking to the crew. A normal fight would be faster-paced. Also, as before, the music in this video is by Rozovian. The track used is more or less what will end up in dev 10 as one of the two space combat background tracks.

As I mentioned back in November, I've been having some persistent trouble with my neck and shoulders, which means that I haven't been able to work nearly as much as I'd like. It also means that you're unlikely to spot me without gloves and scarf at the moment.

Things have been improving, though: thanks to rest, improved ergonomics and pilates exercises, I can now get something done most days. I'm doing both contract work for some immediate income, and continue to work on Space Exploration: Serpens Sector. Its next iteration, dev 10, has been much delayed, but it's steadily trundling towards completion. I have started a Twitter feed where I talk about the game's development. You can follow it here.The next version of the game will feature much nicer and more varied spaceship graphics, and more illustrations as well. I've made this series of renders to show them off:

Obviously, I need to concentrate my limited typing time on work at the moment, so that's all for now. But in time, I should be able to post things a bit more often again.

In December, it snowed heavily in Cambridge, so I went out one day to take pictures. Having spent a some time looking at the landscape and taking pictures I wasn't entirely satisfied with, I then did that thing I usually do: notice some minute detail and spend twenty minutes taking photos of it. In this case, it was a set of icicles stuck to the underside of a car, with the setting sun lighting them from behind.

As for the pictures of the rose, there's a story behind it. More than three years ago, I taped a single rose to the front door of this woman I liked. Since the roses had come in a bundle, I chose to stick one of its siblings into the soil of my back garden.

We've now been very happily together for two and a half years - and the rose is blooming, in December, despite having been mobbed by weeds, trampled, and repeatedly uprooted in the intervening time.