Imaginary Realm Studio

I participated in the 2026 Global Game Jam. I participated for the last two years as well. Each time I started a text adventure.

This year's theme was "Mask." In the game I started this year, the player sometimes has to have a male or female mask on to make it though the game. The diversifiers I chose were an invented language, blind or sighted play, you can play the game walking down the street, music that changes with gamepay, and cross-platform (I worked at the same time in Free Pascal for Windows and N-IDE for Android).

There are only two places to go in the text adventure, an apartment and a restaurant. The player starts with the equivalent of about a hundred dollars. There are only 20 words in the invented language for now. The goal is to wake up, eat three meals, and go to sleep. The phone or computer tells you how much money you have left at the end of the game. How the money is represented using only the 20 words is something I'm still working on.

So far, there is only music in the Windows version, and only blind and sighted people can play the game equally well in the Android version. That is because you can play tones on the speakers in Free Pascal for Windows, but in N-IDE for Android, you can't access the speaker of the phone in the same way. You can use text to speech and speech to text in N-IDE for Android, but I don't know if you can do that in Free Pascal, yet.

At the end of Saturday's work session, I debugged both versions of the game in progress, with few errors but typos. Both were able to run without disabling any of the code like you sometimes have to do to run a partially finished program.

On Sunday, at the end of the Global Game Jam event, my game only played for one round of gameplay. I had about 3 or 4 hours before midnight for the last deadline to submit our work. Gemini thought I could pull through with a dictionary/thesaurus approach instead of use cases in the time that was left. It estimated that it would take a week to finish it the way I was working. I let the last deadline to go by rather than make an AI-assisted last effort. But I learned a little running the game by an AI. Next time I might do that a little sooner.

I am continuing work on the text adventure. It is a goal for future years to not miss the introductory speech, and to get work properly submitted by the deadline.

Of course, it is something of a challenge to set the scope of the game within the time constraints of the event. The first time I limited the game to only one room, and was able to more or less pull through, even though I had to scrap my first programming efforts after a few hours. The second time I participated in the Global Game Jam, I was double booked for the weekend (I volunteered at a festival for a few hours in the middle of the event), and my 12-room text adventure crashed after the phone read out the introductory poem (rhyming was a diversifier that year). This time there are 10 "rooms" in the text adventure.

I hope to finish the 10 room, 20 word version in a few days' work.

-Troy Blum

I am working on a sci-fi novel called Three Terraformed Worlds. In the story, robots and people are careening out of the solar system with a mechanical sun orbiting three terraformed planets. The people are trying to relocate to a new world and the robots are vying for resources.

I am setting a deadline for December 15th, 2026 for the first volume of the novel (slated to be 3 volumes) to be finished and 7,000 copies sold.

- Troy Blum

I was in the 2025 Ingenuity Festival, September 26th, 27th, and 28th.

I was in the Riverside Cemetery Music and Arts Festival on July 27th, 2025 as part of the Lakewood Art League booth.

I drew this pencil and pastel portrait of one of my bosses at work.

These are photos from the SPACES Monster Drawing Rally, August 12th, 2023 where I drew from 4-5 P.M. The event closed at 6:00 P. M.

I am planning on going to the SPACES Monster Drawing Rally today. My time slot is 4-5. I plan to draw a can of Miller High Life and some vegetables, possibly with pencil and colored pencil on 9x 12 drawing paper. In the past, we just got 2 drink tickets, but this year we also get $25 of the first two $75 sales.

I have two pieces in a show at the Doubting Thomas Gallery in Tremont. The theme of the show was fish. The opening was on March 13th, 2020. These are photos of the two pieces.

I was at an 8 foot table for 2 days at the Rocky River Spring Avant Garde Arts and Crafts show. This is a photo of my table on the first day of the show:

I drew this earlier this year. It's pencil and crayon on 8 1/2 x 11 printer paper.