Slow start today; I was pretty exhausted after yesterday and last night's work. Somehow though, I got past the burn and made major progress today.

All the complex movement of both the player and the scroll is finished now, and all that remains is to write interesting spells, and a system for learning spells, and to balance out the game difficulty.

I haven't quite said what Scroll is about yet, let's fix that:

In Scroll, you're a bookworm that's stuck on a scroll. You have to dodge between words and use spells to make your way down the page as the scroll is read. Go too slow and you'll get wound up in the scroll and crushed.

The character is multiple chars in size (size is the worm's only stat), and the worm interacts with the scroll in lots of ways, like swallowing letters, or diving through a hole to the other side of the scroll. While it can swallow some letters, if it gets too full, it can't move forward anymore, so letters are mostly consumed to be used as spell components.

I think that I will manage to get away without adding any kind of monsters to the game; the scroll (and whoever is reading it) is the antagonist.

As I'm writing this very post, I'm imagining the worm wending its way through my paragraphs. This dual experience of text, where you're both reading its content and hyper-aware of its form, is probably the main thing I wanted to explore in writing Scroll.

As to the text that fills the scroll, it's broadly procedurally generated, in what I hope are unusual and repeatedly surprising (and amusing) ways. I'm not showing any screenshots of the real text, because I don't want to give that surprise away.

But, the other thing about Scroll is that it's scroll, a completely usable (if rather difficult..) Unix pager!