Wow, it's almost Christmas again. Thanks for the good wishes, Mandle and SilverSpook.
*cough*
*COUGH*
There's a lot of dust in *this* thread too! I can't believe almost a whole year's gone by.
I'm still working on the game, doing bits and pieces after work and on weekends.
I wanted to wait until I had something nice to show you all, so here it is. These are the thirteen characters that are going to be in the game!

Fine work again by Catpunter! Yes, one of them is basically Stalin. You should see his moustache when it's animated!
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Making a game is tough when you have to work full time. Without wanting to make things too depressing, I won't get a chance to work on this properly until midway through next year. I plan to take time off, and this time I *will* resist the urge to do MAGS. I've been tinkering with little bits in between (mostly systems stuff), but to do any proper writing, I need to be away from work, stress and people in general.
Top of my to-do list right now is adding support for a fourth option to the verb coin (which is only presented when there's more than one action to choose from). The four-option mode will be used for controlling things that go up, down, left and right.
Looking back at the old screenshots, it's interesting to see the old antialiased font. I like it better in some ways, but I've since pared it back to solid black+white with *really* minimal antialiasing. This was mostly a reaction to my mum's comment when I gave her a demo, "it's nice, but why is there a blurry effect on the text?". I think I might contact Grandma Zoo (if you remember her) and get it done properly.
Well, that's how things are going in my world. Hopefully it won't be 10 months between updates next time!