> Nevertheless, excellent job. Have you got another one in the works?

Absolutely. It's coming along very well, but it's a very large and detailed game, so it'll take a while. The game is more along the lines of MR than MV, so it will allow a lot of freedom to play it however you wish to.

I agree with your assessment of how MV turned out. I think it makes a great game for the first run-through but has substantially less repeat value than MR does. But I knew that was how it was turning out. I think the specialized nature of the game made that result inevitable.

The other thing is that, while I was pumped to take advantage of the opportunity to do MV right (I either had to start coding it right when MR was released, so I could snag the early characters, or not at all), this NEXT game, the one I am finally working on, was the one I *really* wanted to be doing all along. It was conceived ten years ago, after I wrote the terminal-based version of MR (see the "Behind the Scenes" section of MR for more information), but I never got the chance to actually start work on it until the week after I released MV.

Since then, I've been puttering on it pretty steadily. Unlike MV, whose nature required that I make minimal changes to the structure, mechanics, and data of MR, this new game has almost every component rebuilt from scratch: navigation, the monster system, the equipment system, and the labyrinth itself, in particular. But because it's all built on the pre-existing MR engine, it's coming together much more quickly than it otherwise would. The part I'm dreading is fine-tuning the gameplay balance. MR took quite a long time to do that for, and because this game is much more complex, it'll be that much more exacting a task.