Our second published game, The Shadow in the Cathedral, is available now in Standard Edition form for Windows XP/Vista/7.

We’re also working on version 2.0 of Jack Toresal and The Secret Letter, which should be released within a few days.

Please visit textfyre.com for more information.

We’re wrapping up Secret Letter 2.0 and Shadow 1.0 over the next few days. Secret Letter has significant changes to the middle and ending, plus there are new images and some UI changes in the Deluxe Edition. Shadow has gone through exhaustive testing, although I’m still having a few people run through it to get those last second issues.

Jennifer Montes is once again doing a set of maps for Shadow (she did the map for Secret Letter that every has loved) and I’m hoping we can get her work into the final product by the 6th. If not, it will be e-mailed to all customers or a link will be provided in the new customer section of the website.

Speaking of the customer section of the website…we’re diligently working on it and although you can register and login, there’s really nothing to see quite yet. We’re going through some business model tweakings and this section may be handled in several different ways. We’re trying to nail down the Classroom Editions of each game before we complete the customer section.

The Classroom Editions will be based partially on SilverFyre, the vanilla Silverlight interpreter that Chris Cavanagh developed a few months ago. This edition will have a slightly different interface since the audience will be middle-school students and their teachers.

We’ve also gotten help from Giles Boutel from the IF community to help out on the website design.

Meanwhile, coding continues on Giant Leaps (Empath’s Gift) and we’re actively seeking a fourth design/writing team.

Adventure Classic Gaming has published their review of Jack Toresal and The Secret Letter.

I started a creative writing/story idea blog at ifstory.wordpress.com. The purpose is to share story ideas that I may or may not implement. Copyright is assumed, but if someone wants to use an idea, they’re welcome to it. The stories will likely be wire frameworks and couldn’t be copyrighted anyway. I’m also inviting people to contribute, so if you have a wordpress account and want to join the blog, let me know.

Secret Letter is now one of the sample applications listed at Silverlight.Net.

Ian, Jon, and I huddled up on the release of Shadow in the Cathedral and we decided to push it out to November 6th. We didn’t want to have the game come out during the competition or even within a week or two of its end. We also need more time to complete the beta testing and packaging. We should be able to have versions for all platforms in November as well.

Those people that pre-ordered Shadow will be offered a beta copy in Standard form on Friday.

We’ve had an almost exact number of expected hits to the website since launching our first game “to the hobbyist community”. I thought we’d get a few more conversions from the IF community, but I think the game itself doesn’t resonate enough there. I do believe the next game, Shadow in the Cathedral, will resonate much more strongly within the IF community, but that’s just a guess.

We also had a number of technical issues and most of these were expected as well. Or at least, we expected problems, but felt confident that whatever came up, we could resolve them easily and quickly. Last night we pushed version 1.06 of Jack Toresal and The Secret Letter to the customer download areas and anyone that needs an upgrade is strongly urged to grab the latest installer.

We resolved the Save problems, the Keyboard Lag problem, and removed the Goudy Font. We also added a Settings page that allows the user to set the font, size, color, and background color.

We’re currently working on a Windows (non-Silverlight) version that should work on PC/Mac/Linux via Mono. We’re also working on a console version that is directed to text-reader-using customers, or blind computer users.

The next game is in the process of design testing and should go into major play-testing soon. That process will take a few weeks and then we can start the final production packaging tasks like artwork and such. The target is to get it out by the end of August, but I think we’re looking at September now. A publish date is in the works.

We’re thankful for all of the support from the hobbyist community. They’re initial purchases were helpful in resolving a few bugs and we appreciate the effort.

Now we need to get the word out to teachers, librarians, and schools.

We completed the initial publishing process last night and added the Intel Mac installation this morning (it’s 5am by me).

You can purchase Secret Letter, for $24.95, from the Textfyre.Com website.

Thanks goes out to Justine de Vesine for building the Mac installation package and to Thomas Lynge of Tenteo for all of his hard work and their partnership respectively.

We still have a lot of work to do. We’re just getting started.

I’m working on the last few bits here. The digital download process is complicated and I want to make sure we test it thoroughly. The installation packages are backed and ready to go. We’re almost there…

Everything is coming together…check out the new cover!