Bank statement analysis software solutions are like chameleons in the world of finance, seamlessly blending into the unique landscapes of diverse businesses. Picture this: just as a skilled artist adjusts their palette to capture the essence of different landscapes, these software solutions adapt their functionalities to paint a vivid picture of financial health tailored to each business's needs.
Imagine a toolkit that transforms itself with the flick of a switch, catering to the intricate nuances of various industries—from the bustling energy sector to the meticulous healthcare realm. These solutions are not just static tools; they're dynamic companions on a journey through the labyrinth of financial data.
So, the next time you ponder the adaptability of bank statement analysis software, envision a versatile ally, ready to shape-shift and evolve alongside your business dreams. After all, in the vibrant tapestry of finance, adaptability isn't just a feature—it's the brushstroke that paints success.
If anyone have any query or want to know more please feel free to ask in comment. Your comments would be highly appreciated.

Got questions about worldbuilding and story ideas? Post them here.

If you have questions about the specifics of the project you're working on that don't constitute prose critique then this is the place for them. We would ask that users do their best to engage with each other's work rather than merely solicit feedback and give nothing in return.
Last week we explored Structures of Loss, interspersing the psychology of grief with its social and literary context. This week, we continue the topic, expanding loss beyond the self, to explore how loss interacts with wider communities, and how literature can address the eventual loss of those societies themselves.
Before we look at its impacts and presentation scaled beyond that of the individual, it is worth recognising that loss—and more specifically, reactions to it as grief—are by no means unique to humanity as a species.
Certain animals are well known for their expressions of emotion. Mute swans will mourn the loss of a partner or cygnet, engaging in formalised pining for a period of days to months. Black swans are recognised to engage in similar behaviours even for close relatives.
Both chimpanzees and gorillas have exhibited grief responses, particularly in the case of mothers who have lost their children—the child’s body will be carried for a number of days before abandonment. Whilst the degree of human learnt behaviour in captive gorillas is somewhat unclear, Koko, a gorilla said to have learnt sign language, reportedly communicated distress on the death of her pet cat; All Ball. Even lions, a species hardly known for their sentimentality, will at a minimum carry dead cubs to a more secluded location to leave them, rather than dropping them at their site of death.
Whilst some sources place the rates of monogamous pair bonding in animals at only around 3-5% of observed mating behaviours; those species that do, are highly correlated to the expression of mourning responses.
The emotional capacity of a significant minority of species towards loss must be accepted as significant. And this is restricted to those species which have been studied and whose behaviours are understood.
Fiction runs on “what if?”
What if there was a society of anthropomorphised mute swans? What if we could better share in the emotions of other species? What if their grief did not stop at the individual?
Climate fiction, as a genre, deals with the consequences of our changing world, on the results of the mass extinction event precipitated by humanity. From Redwall to Animorphs, from Watership Down to Marley & Me, there are immensely successful novels published with non-human species as the focus; to say nothing of sci-fi, let alone fanfiction. Furries, after all, have so much to answer for. There is ample scope for stories on the emotional impact of the world(s) beyond ourselves. It only requires that writers set their sights beyond the obvious, and don’t stop asking “what if?”

Scales of Loss

Whatever stories we tell, however “out-there” their subject or abstract their themes, at the end of the day, they are written for a human audience. Until the Amazon algorithms start reviewing books by themselves, writers will continue to write with other people in mind.
The pursuit of relatability in writing can be as specific or as generalised as you choose to make it. The appeal of a genre, let alone a specific work, can be a very personal thing. But in the attempt, it is not just the dialogue or action of your story that can aid in conveying emotion. The building of worlds that ring true, that fully immerse the audience, is a necessity.
Pathos. Drama. Authenticity.
The best writing—and the best art in general—is that which elicits strong emotional or intellectual responses in its audience.

Perhaps the easiest way of making a town's acquaintance is to ascertain how the people in it work, how they love, and how they die. In our little town (is this, one wonders, an effect of the climate?) all three are done on much the same lines, with the same feverish yet casual air. The truth is that everyone is bored, and devotes himself to cultivating habits. Our citizens work hard, but solely with the object of getting rich.
[...]
What is more exceptional in our town is the difficulty one may experience there in dying. "Difficulty," perhaps, is not the right word, 'discomfort" would come nearer. Being ill is never agreeable but there are towns that stand by you, so to speak, when you are sick; in which you can, after a fashion, let yourself go. An invalid needs small attentions, he likes to have something to rely on, and that's natural enough. But at Oran the violent extremes of temperature, the exigencies of business, the uninspiring surroundings, the sudden nightfalls, and the very nature of its pleasures call for good health. An invalid feels out of it there. Think what it must be for a dying man, trapped behind hundreds of walls all sizzling with heat, while the whole population, sitting in cafes or hanging on the telephone, is discussing shipments, bills of lading, discounts! It will then be obvious what discomfort attends death, even modern death, when it waylays you under such conditions in a dry place.
Albert Camus, La Peste (The Plague), excerpt from Part 1

Critiquing La Peste, Dame Marina Warner—the feminist historian, mythographer, and critic—noted that the book deals with themes of “small heroism and large cowardice”, and forms an “urgent allegory of war”. From the opening sections, the scene laid, the cast introduced to follow the tight scripting of a five-part tragedy of the Greek tradition, these motifs shine through in the worldbuilding.
Camus would probably not have considered his depictions to be worldbuilding—much as he decried the label of ‘existentialist’—as they present a real place; the city of Oran in then French Algeria; nonetheless, his interweaving of the broader conceits of his worldview into the baking streets and narrow alleys of the town do constitute such. The place he presents, at the time he presented it, did not exist.
Even in the above passage, the characterisation of the place and the people are one. Despite its existentialist dread and the absurdist lilt to its writing, La Peste is fundamentally human in its vision and deals with profoundly humanist issues. From the quiet—practical—professionalism of the doctor to the grand pronouncements and zeal of the priest, the lives of the inhabitants are presented with the same clarity and unflinching critique as the dysfunctional government or the inescapable pallor of death that hangs over the town.
Inescapable, perhaps, fatalist in its presentation—the good are no more spared than the craven—the work still holds to a sort of quiet optimism, a bitter survivorship. As Oran is quarantined, isolation sets in, compared to the life of prisoners, parallels drawn between the situation and Camus’ own experiences with both disease and war, conflict spreads as fast as the plague itself.
That short opening refrain promises a cleft in being. A town that is wed to its business, already split in its population from those who can belong and those for whom isolation was the norm before the first stiff-dead rat keeled over on a doctor’s doorstep.
In a more grandiose work, this spread of fear and separation of society itself might show people for "what they truly are", offer some grand revelation as to the nature of humanity. Camus mastery is in not giving in to these narrative excesses.
There are those who seek themselves in the chaos. There are those who hide. But most of all there is a town trying to outlast the situation in which it finds itself, and the best efforts of its inhabitants to merely live.
Mirroring the very real traumas of modern medicine, it is home visits that come to haunt the doctor. He knows, as he enters another house, finds a new carrier, a new patient, a new victim, that he must call the ambulance, that they must be removed. Their family know it too.
People show anger. Desperation. Bitter regret.
They cannot say goodbye.
Once gone, the child/parent/sibling will not return. There will be no funeral, no mourning, no chance to process grief. In hot streets further stripped of the society you start to doubt was ever-present, there is a vanishing. A thinning. But not a death that can be processed. The link between the individual and their living culture has frayed.
In Oran, this absence of ritual is a powerful image. Death, as we have eluded to, is mainly for the living. The mourning period is a necessary social process to allow for naturalised grief outcomes.
Throughout history, and varying communities, the form this has taken has shifted. Even within the confines of the European traditions, the colour association of death rituals has gone through flux. Whilst black dress forms the majority of funerary wear for the modern West, a period of ‘mourning white’ occurred, starting in the 16th century in France. It may have borne some influence from the Far East, where Buddhist tradition favours the colour. The dichotomy of association arises again—purity and decay, celebration and loss.
The Ancient Egyptians viewed gold as imperishable, featuring it heavily; South Africa associates red with its bloody history; Brazilian Catholicism, purple and holiness. So too, the expected social interplay has shifted across years and regions.
The practice of professional mourning, particularly, has had a somewhat chequered history. The career is mentioned in the bible, though it existed for some time before the book's penning. For some, the performance is a matter of ‘face’, of social status. A ritualisation not just of the loss incurred by the greater world due to the individual's demise, but of their stature within the community in life. In somewhat less nakedly hierarchical measures, some cultures did not allow men—as the heads of families—to demonstrate raw emotion, and therefore produced a necessity to act out this displaced grief through proxies. Indeed, the role is most often associated with female mourners; perhaps one of the earliest examples of purely literal emotional labour.
It is these exposure points, transfers between life and death, between the small unit of the family and the large of the community or culture, that can form incredibly powerful moments of resonance within your stories.
How would your imagined peoples react when faced with death? Their own? A loved one? A stranger; from the ingroup or without? Is the ritual more important or the personal response? If the period of mourning is interrupted, the ritual unable to be carried out, what then?
The place of ritualised behaviours in societal maintenance really mustn't be understated. They arguably form the bedrock of a recognisable cultural unity, the sharing of understanding over an event and response pair. But how well equipped are we to mourn that which has not been coded?
Loss of habitat. Loss of culture. The loss of a civilisation itself.
Perhaps the only escape is art. Some things simply cannot be faced head-on, their scale puts them too far outside the immediate reference frame of the individual.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity.
William Butler Yeats, The Second Coming, first stanza

Greek fatalism, Christian redemptionism, bourgeois progressivism, and Marxist utopianism. The American historian Hayden White held them to be the four ‘Grand Narratives’ of Western society. Grand narratives are held to be a form of totalising metadiscourse—they tell stories that provide legitimacy to a particular metaphysics or philosophy of historical viewpoint.
Some would hold that their day is done; outstripped and overtaken by the petits récits—or ‘micronarratives’—of postmodernism. Yet the usage of a similar guiding metanarrative for storytelling can bolster the audience’s interaction with chosen themes, and form a necessary bridging point between their livid experience and the idealised world of fiction.
Yeats had his own, that of two interlocked spirals; gyres of history. The Second Coming is one of the most-anthologised of Yeats’ work, and yet it is almost deliberately opaque, steeped in abstract imagery and provocation.
‘Storm clouds gather over Europe’. Necessary ceremony is halted, lack of innocence ensues, chaos rises, and the standout figures of the hour are at best feckless, and at worst dangerously crazed. The second stanza doubles down. A literal second coming answers. It arrives, not of Christian faith and redemption, but a great and terrible Beast squatting on the desert, marching on Bethlehem.
In “The Philosophy of Horror”, Noel Carroll offers a view of the ‘monster’ as representing “category error”, a societally unacceptable fusion of definition that eschews easy understanding. The representation of the Sphinx falls neatly into this view. It contrasts man and beast, pitiless and austere, heralded by red birds and slouching ponderously toward a place of purity to be born. Yet it is impure itself. An agent of chaos.
To a society undergoing its own religious shakeups, the figure and the contrast forced a reckoning with recent history and its projection into the future. It called upon traditional cultural guides and twisted them to new purpose; a Spiritus Mundi for the Age of Collapse.
Delightfully blasphemous, powerful in its presentation, it formed the avatar of an aphorism Yeats hoped might bring across his views on historical progression. It conjures the loss of something ineffable: at once a way of life and a cultural expectation of desired future, now dead. Certainly, it succeeded in resonating with an audience who would live through the horrors it promised.
Written in 1919, in the shadow of the then ‘Great War’, the poem also came out of a period of plague. The Spanish Flu swept the world, its death toll in the tens of millions; and pregnant women such as Yeats' own wife had amongst the highest mortality rates. Penned during her convalescence, Yeats was aware of the British government’s decision to send the Black and Tans to Ireland, precipitating the Irish War of Independence. Given his later writing, it would not be out of the question to think he had his suspicions that the period of relative peace after WWI would be just that; relative, and sadly temporary.
Whilst his full worldview—set out in A Vision—of the falling of science to dark mysticism and esotericism, of the inverting of historical order, would not come to pass; his singular image, and commitment to portraying it in art, would aid in the presentation and appeal of a number of his works.
This feature has touched before on “The Narrative Construction of Reality”, by Jerone Bruner. For those in need of a refresh, the work outlines five concepts; cannon and breach (reference and transgression of audience expectation), particularity (the drawing in of the audience through specific perspective details), intentional states (the cohesion of need with event progression), implied interpretation (unique resultant meaning created in the audience), and referentiality (a connection to the audience's beliefs, worldviews, or emotions) that separate a ‘narrative’ from a mere ordered recounting of events.
It is this constant drawing back of concept to the reader and their participation that is essential for good story-telling in general; and good worldbuilding in particular.
Know your audience.
You could spend inordinate tracks of time narrowing down every detail, getting your magic system rock hard, floridly illustrating compass points on your map, but if the resultant dreamed locale doesn’t resonate, you’ve ultimately wasted your time. Story and world should not be separable entities. The events in question should not be able to be told elsewhere.
Characters must be relatable, must represent specific perspectives. The marrying of theme and progression must generate resultant meaning. Your audience must have their expectations answered or defied.
Art is a discourse with the society and worldview that birthed it. Ensure you don’t slip into monologue.
Best of luck, as ever, with your projects.
This has been your quick and dirty overview of Scales and Mourning. I'd like to pose you with three questions to prompt discussion on the topics explored. You can join us here next week for continued exploration of the current theme with Fall and Fade, where we turn inwards to cover the metaphorical deaths of the mind and other endings. Due to my timetable, my previous habit of writing these on Wednesdays is unsustainable, so don’t be surprised if the topics become more fluid than they have been previously.

Of the above tropes and ideas would you say there is one that you have touched on in telling your own stories?

For a current project, have you explored losses? If you are comfortable discussing them, have these touched on your own experiences?

Let's get personal. In published works would you say there are any stories you think handled these representations particularly well? What about particularly badly?

Preview:
Whilst, as the last few weeks have demonstrated, the presentation of concepts can end up taking place over different lengths of time, I plan for the upcoming weeks to cater to the following progression of ideas:
Death >> Destruction >> Pessimism >> Optimism >> Music >> Hope >> Fear >> Horror >> Subversion >> Unreality >> Dreams
And that's my bit for this week. I'll post a comment below for people who wish to leave suggestions for how this slot will continue to evolve in the future.
Have a great week,
Mob

Company Name	Title	City
Cylcon Jobs	Amazon Workforce Staffing Seasonal Parttime Amazon Warehouse Worker With 1000 Signon Bonus	City Of Parma
Doordash	Delivery Driver / Courier	Kent
Doordash	Delivery Driver (part or full time) with DoorDash - Make up to $18/hour	Navarre
Ups	Tractor Trailer Driver	Delaware County
Holland Regional Trucking	CDL A Truck Driver - Home Daily	Catawba
Heartland Health Care Center	Registered Nurse - RN	Chillicothe
Holland Regional Trucking	CDL A Truck Driver - Home Daily	Creola
The Home Depot	Customer Service Associate	Grand River
Holland Regional Trucking	Truck Driver CDL A - Great Home Time	Lewis Center
The Home Depot	Customer Service Associate	Middlefield
Trilogy Health Services	LPN - Licensed Practical Nurse	Pickerington
United Parcel Service	Warehouse Worker - Package Handler	Zanesville
Doordash	Delivery Driver / Courier	Alliance
HCR ManorCare	MDS RN Nurse	Arcanum
Roadmaster	Hiring CDL Instructors	Bremen
Roadmaster	CDL A Instructor - Average $52,000 per year!	Catawba
HCR ManorCare	Unit Manager - ADON RN	Cygnet
HCR ManorCare	MDS RN Nurse	Farmersville
The Home Depot	Customer Service Associate	Huntsburg
Roadmaster	Hiring Class A CDL Instructor	Magnetic Springs
Ats	Licensed Clinical Social Worker (LCSW)	Wright-Patterson Air Force Base
Ups	Warehouse Worker - Package Handler	Cuyahoga County
Ups	Warehouse Worker - Package Handler	Stark County
American Greetings	Designer	Westlake
Ascent Global Logistics	Company Truck Driver	Boardman
Ascent Global Logistics	Owner Operator Truck Driver	Fairfield
HCR ManorCare Inc.	Registered Nurse - RN	Sylvania
United Parcel Service	Warehouse Worker - Package Handler	Akron
Jimmy John''s	Catering Manager - Food Services	Avon Lake
Jimmy John''s	Food Delivery Driver	Avon Lake
Jimmy John''s	Food Delivery Driver	Bay Village
Hub Group Trucking	Hub Group Trucking: Cdl- A Local Owner Operator Truck Drivers	Bowling Green
Hub Group Trucking	Hub Group Trucking: Cdl- A Local Operator Truck Drivers	Broadview Heights
Hub Group Trucking	Hub Group Trucking: Cdl- A Local Operator Truck Drivers	Brook Park
William E Steward & Son, Inc.	William E Steward & Son, Inc.: Laborers	City Of Middletown
DHL Supply Chain	DHL Supply Chain: Cdl A Delivery Drivers	City Of Rossford
DHL Supply Chain	DHL Supply Chain: Cdl A Delivery Drivers	City Of Toledo
United Parcel Service	Warehouse Worker - Package Handler	Columbia Station
UT Health East Texas	UT Health East Texas: Registered Nurse (Rn) Labor & Delivery	Township Of Athens
UT Health East Texas	UT Health East Texas: Registered Nurse (Rn) Er	Township Of Athens

Hey guys, here are some recent job openings in oh. Feel free to comment here or send me a private message if you have any questions, I'm at the community's disposal! If you encounter any problems with any of these job openings please let me know that I will modify the table accordingly. Thanks!

Verified? (This bot cannot verify AMAs just yet)
Date: 2012-08-20
Link to submission (Has self-text)
Link to my post

Questions	Answers
How do you feel the change from point-and-click to walking around in 3D will affect the overall feel and atmosphere of the game? This atmosphere, rather than the gameplay and puzzles, is why I feel the game is so embedded in my memory. Also: Aside from the obvious, how much are you changing with regard to content?	The atmosphere is absolutely something we want to retain from the original. It’s a reason we love Riven too. Retaining atmosphere is an issue that sometimes even conflicts with the freedom we’re trying to inject, yes. For example, sometimes in the original, the feeling of a certain scene is dependent on the direction the player is looking. We may have to limit the player’s view for scenes like that, to get them to see everything that needs to be seen, but questions like that are still up in the air. In terms of content, we’re changing very little. We want the puzzles to play the same, we want the player to be just as well guided and we want the story to be told exactly the same way. The changes we want to make are purely aesthetic.
Will little objects lying around, like books, scientific instruments, etc. be movable?	We want to have things be as dynamic as possible, so as much as we can, yes, little objects will be at least a little moveable.
Will the Stranger see more of Tay this time around? If so, how much of the area was already sketched out by Cyan?	While there’s always the possibility of ‘backstabbing’, it’s extremely unlikely as we’ve picked our group pretty carefully. Also, not having to deal with Hollywood, or any overseeing corporation/group (outside Cyan), we have a much more hands-on level of control with the project. I think that this means fewer fights, less drama, and a more cohesive group overall.
Can the Stranger see his reflection?	And no, the Stranger cannot see his or her reflection.
Since Cyan Worlds approved your work, have you considered asking if they would have old files of 3d models? (conversion would be probably be possible) - How do you think you will insert the characters (who were real actors in the original game) - How awesome does it feels to walk in Riven?	As was stated in our Mysterium presentation, we’re currently working with Cyan to dig up the old files if at all possible. They can’t devote too much time to it on their end, so it’s a slow process. Characters are all being digitally modeled after their original actors, and animated to match the original acting.
Hows that going to work? Are you getting the OK to release the audio assets or will there be an installer that extracts the .wav files from the disk/digital download?	The current plan is to embed the audio in the scene files, the way Unity normally embeds textures and scripts. This is the standard recommended way of doing it in Unity, not anything tricky or proprietary.
What decisions lead to the choice to use 3d models instead of recasting? I for one love the old style green screen game production, and purchase any game that uses it almost on impulse. Edit: nevermind, ctrl+f is my friend.	Please see here.
What platforms are you targeting?	We’re currently targeting the main platforms that Unity supports, Windows and OS X. Future versions of Unity will support Linux, so that may be a possibility in the future, as well.
Cho?	Fahleeaiay. Kahkah wahdevol.
This is the first I've heard of your project, though I've wanted something exactly like it since RealMyst released however many years ago. Will it play like RealMyst and Uru...meaning, will you basically be using FPS controls to walk around and explore the ages? Or will you still be tied down to specific points, only able to look around?	We’re currently planning on having a number of different navigation systems. If you wanted, you would be able to navigate with FPS controls, or else you could switch to a node-based navigation mode.
Great to keep the node-based navigation.	Just to be clear, however, we don't currently intend on having a Riven-style navigation mode (static camera nodes). Our implementation is closer to the navigation system in Exile and Revelation, freelook nodes.
What a coincidence! I just finished the final block mold for my sculpted moiety daggers this weekend! They're made of heavy plastic! Would you and your team like a few freebies for good luck? I intended for these to be gifts for a few of my friends for the holidays :D.	Of course, we’d love that - they look awesome. If you send us a message at general@starryexpanse.com, we can work something out :)
Will you use the original live-action cutscenes?	We’ll be using 3D character models to recreate the cutscenes based on the original live action.
Will you use the original soundtrack? There's an area on one of the early islands which is left over from when they were connected with bridges. You can't get to it, but it's visible in promotional materials and from one of the trams. Will that be included as a sort of Easter egg?	As for the music, we may be using the original soundtrack by itself, but we may also be adding on to it, or recreating (at least parts of) it. We would do this because some music might not exist in unadulterated audio files (i.e. it only exists combined with sound effects). This doesn’t lend itself well to 3D space. So, we’d need to either re-create it or try to separate the music from the sound effects. A lot of this depends on what of the original sound assets still exists at Cyan Worlds.
	I think you’re talking about the garden on Jungle Island. We’ve talked about modeling it, but we don’t have any concrete plans. Chances are you wouldn’t be able to get there without explicitly enabling it.
We’ll be using 3D character models to recreate the cutscenes based on the original live action. Why on earth would you do that?	See here.
What is it like coordinating long distance? My game design partner recently moved to the West Coast from the East, and we're still trying to figure out the best way to organize ourselves. Given that you gus are working across state lines and countries, isn't the distance issue a challenge?	Distance is a big issue, but it’s sort of always been that way so we’ve adapted and gotten used to it. We originally used Google Wave, which was nice because it provided a sort of chat-like medium for communication along with image sharing and stuff, but that got very very unorganized (and slow, for some team members). That reason (combined with Wave shutting down) caused us to move to a forum, which was pretty slow to use, and then to IRC, which we’ve kept for a few years now. One hugely advantageous thing we’ve made use of in IRC is a bot that will store offline messages to users that aren’t present, and will deliver them when the user reappears. I think that’s been a very useful addition to our IRC — though other protocols like Jabber might support that out of the box, I dunno.
How did you get the Cyan worlds guys to give the OK?	We were honestly really worried about that and had no idea how it was going to happen. The original plan was to get a few areas “completely ready” and box it up and send it with a letter to Cyan, maybe even show up at their office to talk about it. We weren’t sure at all what Cyan thought about the project for a long time, and one of the scariest moments was when we saw “mail.cyan.com” as a referrer to our site. Our basic plan was to remain as silent to them as possible until everything was perfect, so as not to prematurely make a bad impression... Well, it ended up that one day Tony Fryman just emailed us out of the blue, saying he wanted it to be official, and sent us some legal documents. Boy was that a good day. :P.
I saw a Unity 3d icon in one of your movies but had trouble getting it to load (something tells me your site probably has pretty heavy traffic right now.) Are you using Unity and if so, what has your experience been?	We are using Unity. We find that it’s a great platform to build a game on, though much of what we want to do isn’t supported out of the box — so we have to hack it together or fake it. The result is a ton of our own infrastructure, which we hadn’t really anticipated. But, for most projects, Unity should be great, and it’s especially good for budding game developers.
Wow, Cyan contacting you to make it official must have been awesome.	You have no idea.
Will you be looking to find a new audience of players who never played any of the Myst games before? Will you be making any changes to the game to cater to these new players who have different expectations of games than those of us who played in the 90s?	Robyn has contacted us with an offer to provide us with some of his notes and other assets, and we will certainly be making use of those. We also intend to tweak puzzles a bit, to keep it interesting for veteran players (randomizing puzzles that were not randomized in the original, for example), while still maintaining the content and story from the original game.
I saw on the Tinselman blog Robyn posted the game design document for Myst and some early maps for Riven but they're all 404s now, do any of you have or know of online copies of these?	We’d love to attract new players to the series, but we acknowledge that this is very much a fan’s game.
Did you bring the page?	No... but we got the donuts!
Are Easter Eggs ('O Sole Mio, the faces, Spyder's egg hunt, Silly Putty, RAWA, etc.) under the purview of "keep it original", or are they too partial to the medium, original development crew, etc. to be included?	We plan to keep the original easter eggs intact as much as possible, in keeping with our aim to create a perfect recreation of Cyan’s original work. You have to understand that we are obsessive fanboys, and want this to be perfect.
	Of course, we may have a few surprises of our own to add in. :)
Are there any puzzles that will be hard to recreate in 3d, requiring tweaks or increased ingenuity? I'm thinking about the animal shapes scattered around the village island in particular; do you expect those to be hard to find because of movement freedom?	There are challenges like that, yes. Riven has lots of small things that were easier to find in its format, but we’ll be working hard to make sure the player is guided the same way in our remake. If necessary, we may use visual cues to lure the player to the right area, and of course the player won’t be given so much freedom as to wander off of a jungle path and lose the gameplay trail completely. Perhaps we will slightly constrain paths in certain areas to make sure the animal shapes are visible.
What is your favourite part of Riven?	Edited: changed Philip's favorite part of Riven.
What is, to you, the most interesting location in Riven?	Most interesting location in Riven: Nick: I’d have to agree with Everett. The gateroom is by far my favourite location. The beetle slides, the ink/writing themed symbolism, and the whole thing spins! The easiest puzzle in the game, but one of the most memorable. Zib: I think boiler island is the most interesting location, all the crawling through pipes!
Is there anything you want to change about the actual game? Puzzles, mechanics, voice-actors, anything?	Zib: My favorite part of the game was the first time that you see a firemarble dome open. That, or possibly the first maglev ride. God, I don’t know, it’s such a fantastic game... Everett: The gateroom. The slides found inside the beetles are some of my favorite art in the game. (I actually spent a few weeks working full time to perfectly recreate them in HD for our remake.) Your first time through, you’re likely to not even understand what’s going on in them, but once you start to understand the lore, you see that they tell the backstory leading up to the original Myst. Philip: The only thing I’d want to change is something we don’t have to go out of our way to do, which is being able to look around 2π radians. The original game can get pretty confusing when the different views aren’t exactly 90 degrees apart from each other and you can’t see where continuous objects (e.g. pipes on Boiler Island) go. Everett: Apart from obvious aesthetic changes we’re already making, I guess I would make the number game a little less repetitive. Having to repeat the number game over and over when you have all but 2 digits is pretty annoying.
Is the final product going to be sold or free? If sold, is Cyan Worlds getting a share?	We have not fleshed out our distribution plans at all yet. However, if money is pulled in for the game, we intend to give most of it, at least, to Cyan.
What software are you guys using, Maya? I might be interested in lending a hand w/ animation if you have a need for it :)	We are flexible when it comes to 3d modelling software. At the moment some of us use Maya, while some of us use Blender. Send us an email at general@starryexpanse.com.
What are some of the weather effects you plan to add?	Our sky system is quite complex, and will be able to change weather states from clear to rainy. Extreme thunderstorms may pop up on rare occasions. And no, we have no plans to support snow at this time. :)
Do you like waffles?	Waffles are awesome and delicious.
What about carrots?	Eugh. Why would you bring carrots into this? We had such a nice thing going with the waffles...
What are the challenges of remaking an open-ended game like Riven, by opposition to, say, Myst itself, which was fairly linear?	One issue that comes to mind is loading. In Myst, the game is split into small areas (the ages) which are isolated from one another. In Riven, the player spends time in an area which is massive, encompassing a much larger area than any of Myst’s ages. Even worse for us, the player can see all of the islands from many places in the game. This will require some tricky loading systems which we’re still in the process of designing.
	For example, when you stand on Temple Island and look across at Jungle Island, we can’t keep Jungle Island loaded at full quality, simply because we’d be using too much of the computer’s resources. We can however load in a low detail version of Jungle Island to be seen only from far away. The changeover points for these models will probably be during island changes, like maglev rides.
Do you guys ever misspell "mist" as "myst" in your daily lives? I do all the time, I assume from growing up playing the Myst games.	Everyone else: We pretty much all grew up playing Myst since we were toddlers. :P.
Love Riven! played it as a kid and have just started re-playing it again. Will it still be the classic point and click game or will that be changed?	There will be a couple movement options, just like in MYST V. You’ll be able to move freely with wasd or arrow keys, or (plans are that) you will be able to move in a classic point-and-click mode instead.
Will the game be beatable? You know, without a guide or anything. Myst was Water Temple difficult through the entire thing and I still screwed it up at the end.	Well, it’ll be harder than Myst, simply because Riven was harder than Myst. We don’t plan on (intentionally) making our remake any harder than the original Riven. If anything, it might be easier since some of the “hidden hotspots” could be easier to see when you’re walking around than as a few pixels in a static image.
Didn't Ubisoft own the rights to this franchise? I think I saw some books full of concept and CD with the original models in our archives, somewhere... I am very happy someone take the time to remaster old games like that! Good jobs!	Ubisoft actually lost the rights to the games a few years ago. They were held by GameTap and its parent company for a while, but by now all of the rights for the Myst series have returned to Cyan Worlds.
Will you folks bring back Jack Wall to do the musical score for the game? One of the most amazing things about the Myst series has always been the music. Good luck to you and the game.	Robyn Miller actually did the music for Myst and Riven, but it’s highly unlikely that we’re going to get him or Jack Wall to help us out with music. We definitely intend to give the audio part of the game its due, however. We intend for our music to be just as great as the rest of the series.
When do you think you'll be finished?	Years at this rate. Maybe two, maybe three. Unless we actually decided to work on this full time, at the expense of our real jobs and schoolwork, the work is going to remain slow and steady. Riven is a big, big place to recreate.
What about getting the original video recordings from cyan?	That’s a possibility. Neither we nor Cyan knows exactly what they have, at this point. They’re sorting through some old tapes as we speak.
You've mentioned that you might be able to use some extra hands... What kind of help are you looking for? I don't suppose you need any programming work done?	We’re always looking for more help, and we do need programmers. If you’re interested in helping out, send us an email - general@starryexpanse.com!
Why did you decide to remake Riven?	We love Riven, and we think it deserves the same treatment that Myst got with RealMyst.
How did you get into the game industry in Australia?	It’s tough, and I’ve not been in the industry very long. I did a TAFE course in game design which got me started, and then I just applied to various mod teams and indie game projects to get some experience working with teams while I sent out many, many showreels to the few game companies around Australia.
So looking forward to this. Please pay close attention to the ambient music. It's one of the most memorable pieces of the game for me.	Music is definitely on our list of priorities. If at all possible, we’d like to use the original soundtrack, as we agree it defines Riven’s mood. Failing that, we’ll do our absolute best to recreate that feeling with a new soundtrack.
Also: any plans to allow modding or player created levels?	Mod support is always being discussed, but we haven’t yet decided on anything. It really depends largely on how we go about publishing.
Do you realize you are creating a whole generations dreams?	It’s a big responsibility, but we think we’re the right ones to do it.
I'm a mid-forties female. I remember Myst clearly; it was the first online game that ever appealed to me, other than Tetris -- and the way I went about "solving" it, how I wrapped my head around it, was very different from my male peers. Unless Max is a girl, your team is all male. Are gender issues something you've spent any time kicking around?	We’re completely open to having women on the team; we just haven’t received much interest from such folks. We have (or have had) a couple women on the team: notably Melinda “Rivenchan” Russell (who worked at Cyan!) and historically, Averil White, who left for personal reasons, as well as Brianna Rhodes, who will be composing original music for the project.
I was pretty sure you weren't a bunch of misogynistic boys-only types. :) But on the anthropology side, have you all spent any time kicking around the differences in gender response? And have they decreased since Myst first came out, is the current generation less differentiated?	Well, I don't think we could speak to that, since most of us were just kids when Myst came out.
How do you like working in Unity? Are you creating a lot of custom tools for this, or mostly working with the engine as it already exists? What do you love/hate about the platform?	Unity is really the first industry-level game engine I've done work with, so I'm not sure I'm really qualified to make any judgments about its capabilities. I can really appreciate the pre-built assets that come with the engine, like the image effects and special shaders — they provide a great starting point that doesn't come with many other engines (if any). The only problem with them is that their controls seem a little too simplified sometimes. Overall, Unity does a great job making it easy to at least look things up and find examples.
I'm working at a company that relies pretty heavily on Unity for game-like applications, and I'm still too new to really have developed a love or hate for it, since it's all still a mystery to me.	I am sometimes frustrated with Unity but only because of pretty minor things. For instance, we wanted to use the terrain engine for caves and things like that, but it operates based on a height map, so you can't create concave shapes. If you want we can discuss the technical details via email, philip@starryexpanse.com — it's probably too detailed to get into everything here.
Any chance of it being sold bundled with RealMyst? The few copies remaining are going for upwards of $90 on Amazon.	We don't know yet. If you're talking about physical copies of the game, we'll probably need to get a bunch of pre-orders before we can commit to making those.
Will the live-action actors be incorporated in this game?	Just so you know, though, you can buy downloads of realMYST on Steam or on GOG.
Can you guys make the whole Myst trilogy for the newer Mac's? or even the newer PC's?	That's another project for somebody else. There is RivenX for OS X, and there's a Steam version of Riven (and maybe Myst)? As well as a couple other remakes for modern systems. Check out MYST: Masterpiece Edition and realMYST.
So in 2066 when this game comes out will it have multiplayer?	>We’ve toyed with the idea of multiplayer, but it would essentially break the game, as there are many puzzles that rely on a player being in a specific location when a button is pushed, etc. It is a fun thought experiment though, giving you many “what-if” scenarios to think up.
Riven fanatic here, will you also be including all the old easter eggs?	See here!
It looks great, to clarify will this be similar to Real Myst. Also I couldn't find on your site, will the game be Mac compatible?	Yes, it will be similar to realMYST. Currently we are set to support Mac.
Any long term hopes for a PS3 version?	There are no plans for a PS3 version at the moment.
Why can't game makers issue "expanded" editions rather than just remakes? For example combining locations from different games in an extended plot?	Just a remake of Riven is enough work. The game and Ages are huge, so there's a lot of modeling. Besides that, Riven couldn't fit plot-wise into the Ages from any other Myst games, because of the way it ends.
I love the Myst world. Why remake a game rather than create another one? I would love to play a new Myst.	Well, there are a couple reasons. Briefly, we think that Riven deserves the same treatment as Myst got with realMYST. As for creating a new Myst game, that's something that's been done already (several times), and we feel that this is a relatively unattempted project that a lot of people would like to see done. So, we're doing it. :-)
Can you please bring back the Beachcombing Water Bird or Link to www.myst5.com. Either way. I am a biologist. You showed my some of the most inspirational xenofauna and xenoflora that has ever inspired my fine art concepts -- without telling me much about them. Torture. Unadulterated pain. Are you going to, or could you please indulge my need to know more about them? Maybe some in-game ID'ing mission?	I'm sorry to be the bearer of this news, but we were kids when Riven came out — we're just the ones remaking it. You should send your message toward Cyan Worlds, though (specifically "RAWA"), they might be able to tell you more about the sunners.
On Twitter you asked for name suggestions for the game engine you are developing in Unity. Are there plans to release the engine? If so, what are those plans?	We're working on getting the sky to a state where we can package it, and we may release other tools that we've made to assist us with development, but releasing the whole engine seems unlikely.
	Edit: by the way, we decided on the name "Cygnet".
Need help?	We're always looking for quality help. Send us an email at general@starryexpanse.com.
Is it still going to be ridiculously, annoyingly difficult to finish Riven? Will I have to use 5 discs and keep changing them in and out of my CD player?	It'll be on download or whatever the most popular physical software medium is at the time of release.
Why so low res textures?	I assume you're referring to the terrain on Prison Island? If so, we're going to re-do that one. It was originally made with different constraints in mind.
Do you find it annoying that all searches for "Riven" will point towards League of Legends?	Well, we don't typically search for just "Riven". Anyways, this is what my first page of results looks like for Riven.
Riven is my favorite Myst game, and I'm sure this will be beautiful, but I can't help but wonder, why remake instead of making a whole new chapter?	Please see here.
Why?	Please see here.
Can I have a copy when you all are done?	Please see here.
Thank you, but that doesn't answer the question of why aren't you making a new chapter instead.	There are already five Myst games, plus URU and its expansions. We'd rather give attention to Riven, which has been comparatively ignored over the years, plus there's just a larger demand for a realRiven than there is for a "MYST VI".
Will you be remaking the whole series? I could use a version of Myst for my current OS :P.	Unfortunately, no. There are probably versions that work for your current OS, though, which one is it?
I have Exile for Windows 7, so that's ok. But I'm dual booting Windows 7 and Snow Leopard. I have been searching for a way to get Riven to play on either system, to no avail.	Riven should run on Windows 7; have you tried compatibility mode? For Snow Leopard, there's RivenX.
I'm a student enrolled in Game Design at Full Sail University. I love writing and coming up with ideas for games. Where do I send my resume?	Shoot us an email at general@starryexpanse.com!
So i just signed up for the beta, how many signups have you had since posting this AMA?	Hundreds.
I realize this is really old, but I was away for the day yesterday and totally missed out on this, you created my favorite PC series when I was a kid and i still love your guys' game. Thank you for being awesome.	We didn't create Riven (Cyan did), but we're glad you liked it! We did too!
You are doing the lords work.	We know.
Link to www.devklog.net.	Those of us developing on OS X absolutely love this project.
Because the resolution, and therefore quality of the original videos is horrendous for 2012, and Real Actorstm are expensive.	Also it'd be impossible to coordinate transportation, or pay for production costs. It’d cost probably a couple thousand dollars just to move the necessary people to a central location (see our team members’ geographic locations), then a few more thousand dollars to hire the actors, then a few more thousand to get a camera and production equipment (and studio) plus blue screen and lighting and stuff.
	(And even then, we’d be forced to restrict the player's movement.)
Ask them where "The book of Marrim" is! Im dying here! Also, your work looks promising. Any plan's to "port" a copy toward a touch platform (modern phones, and W8 coming out!)	We currently have no plans to port the game to mobile platforms, but Unity does support most of them - it’s not entirely outside the realm of possibility, that we could port to modern phone platforms, and maybe Windows Phone, too.
I never played Riven but I recall my parents having it and told me I couldn't play because "I wouldn't understand." My parents didn't like me all that much..	Sometimes parents just don't understand.

Last updated: 2012-08-25 01:00 UTC
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