Life came up and bit me.

The astute of you may have noticed that I haven't really updated the blog in a month.  I have been rather busy, but not as busy with making games as I would have liked.  Peter probably could have said something, but he doesn't seem to like blogging.

It all started one Sunday when I came downstairs to feed the cat.  Carpet by the bathroom was wet.  I was annoyed at the cat, assuming that she had done it, but didn't have the time to really take care of it right then.  When I came back down I realized that the cat didn't have enough fluids in her little body to have made the mess, so I started wondering what was going on.  I soaked up the water as best I could, but in the evening we found that the water was back with a vengeance.  We had someone come out to figure it out and after a number of cuts in the wall he found a broken pipe behind our shower.  It was coming from our dishwasher and the sink, so the water was pretty dirty.  It had been going on long enough that it had soaked all beneath the bathroom all the way through to the carpet on the other side.

After we contacted insurance and had another company come out to look at tearing up the floor and replacing it we thought we were doing alright.  We just had to wait for the stars to align so that things would happen and things would get fixed.  (The broken pipe that was causing the flooding got fixed, but the mess it left behind is still there.)  Then, Tuesday last week my youngest child threw up all over me (and the dishes I had just washed) right after getting out of the bath.  I figured it was about time for me to take a shower so we got her cleaned up again.  She threw up three more times that night and I was on clean up patrol for each time.  I got to bed late, and woke up a lot during the night to check on her.  Our other daughter wasn't feeling well and was coughing in our bed all night long, which helped me wake up to go check on the younger.

So, Wednesday last week, I was very tired and figured it was about time I did another blog post.  Just as I was about to start my wife called and told me I needed to come home right away for and emergency.  After some prying, it turns out that ANOTHER pipe had broken.  This one wasn't a drain pipe and it was soaking the basement.  She managed to get the water shut off before I got there, but more than half the basement was sopping wet.  Having no water with two sick kids wasn't an option, so my wife took the girls to my parents house for the night while I stayed to clean up and wait for our handyman, who I was really hoping would be able to fix the leak so we could turn the water back on.

Thankfully, he was able to cap the pipe before the leak so we could turn the water back on.  The pipe had been installed wrong, so if he had just fixed the place where it was leaking it would just happen again.  In the end I was up until 1 in the morning soaking up water, moving things and pulling up the carpet to dry.  After that I had a well-deserved dinner and a shower and realized that I was working in the morning.  After 5 hours of sleep I was back up and getting ready for work.

Now that my excuses are out of the way, Peter tells me that we are very close to getting the demo done for Siphon Spirit.  He's given me more art so I can tidy up a few screens, and we're mainly down to audio issues now.  I'm looking forward to the kickstarter.  One thing we're going to do is introduce a smaller puzzle game that backers will get early access to the demo.  Peter will have just about all the art finished ahead of time so I can actually have things looking nice from the start.

The Japanese Game has also made progress (expect for a name, of course).  I've been adding mouse support since that makes much more sense to do things that way.  I just have four more screens to add it to, and of course I saved the hardest ones for last.  Even with all these problems, I think we should have two games ready for being shown off at Indie Game Night next week.

Here's hoping that we'll make enough money to help pay back what it's costing to fix my home...