While working on the PC version of Lines of Questioning, I realized that I had incidentally learned how to do everything that had previously prevented me from doing a PC implementation of Over the Next Dune. Since one of my current goals is to get OtND in front of more playtesters, and being able to put a ready-to-play version of the game up for download would certainly help with that, I decided to give it a try.

Currently sitting on my hard drive is a version of the game that works. It’s rules-enforced, although a few rules aren’t implemented yet. It has art–not anything that would win awards, but at least something that demonstrates a theme.

Unfortunately, as of last week the game had two bugs. Absolutely game-breaking, comical bugs. One allowed the enemy to Time Walk the players; the other caused everything to screech to a halt and the game to enter an unrecoverable state.

Today I squashed one of them.

One more bug and the game will be playable, albeit in a cheerfully feature-incomplete alpha state. A few additions past that, and some polish, will have the game ready for speedy distribution to playtesters. At that point we’ll have both a PC version of the game and freely and broadly distributable playtest copies, all in one go. Not bad . . . .