A signal reaches out from the Oort Cloud

I posted this on my G+ feed last week, but forgot to make an actual blog post.

The main part of that message reads, if you're interested:

01001001 01101110 01110100 01101111 00100000 01010100 01101000 01100101 00100000 01001111 01101111 01110010 01110100 00001010 01000001 01110010 01110010 01101001 01110110 01101001 01101110 01100111 00100000 01101111 01101110 00100000 01000101 01100001 01110010 01110100 01101000 00001010 00110010 00110111 00100000 00110001 00110000 00100000 00110010 00110000 00110001 00110111

Feel free to decode and share. TL;DR - I've given myself a deadline to motivate me finishing Into The Oort. I think it's workable. And when I announced this last week, the time between the announcement and the deadline was the amount of time it takes a radio signal to go from the Oort Cloud to Earth. It felt right.

The to do list:

• Really figure out what does and doesn't work in my current framework for the game.
• Figure out what I know I want but don't have yet, and fill those gaps.
• Experiment with Scribus to look at layout options with that (everything so far is in an OpenOffice document).
• ART! I want a lot. Which means contacting artists. I'm making a list of the kinds of pieces I think would be good, then checking portfolios. I have one or two names in mind already.
• More playtesting. In particular spaceships and travel. Things are not as concrete in that respect yet and they need to be.
• A playtest pack. Aim for this to be done, in one form or other, for mid-March. Yeah, I know, I think I said that last year. But this year it will be.

Want to know more about Into The Oort? Drop me an email, or a comment, or something. Oh, and I've extended my January Sale on print copies of the zine to the end of the month. Sales help build the art fund for Into The Oort - if you want any or all of the first three issues of A Random Encounter with a little money off then buy them from the sale page. I'll even throw in a print version of Oddpool too!