The August Doldrums
Seasons is still going, although not as quickly as I would like. Right now I’m stitching together summer, which as far as bare-bones plot goes is roughly at 60%. I know what the other puzzles are, I just have to complete them and make it winnable. I’m not sure what to do about thirst in this season. I’ll probably take it out. I might take it out of the game completely. Although it’s realistic, it’s one of those things that might be too real in that it distracts from the enjoyment of playing a game.
New Cat I haven’t touched since I started it a few weeks back. The ideas are still in my mind, but I’ve been distracted by my angsty social/political life, I guess.
Brickhouse is moving forward in starts and fits. I’ve got the atmosphere down cold. I just figured out how to do timers in ALAN last night, so the first scene should be done tonight. Then I’m on to objects in the first few rooms. It’s fun learning a new language and wrapping your brain around a different perception of the world.
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Side Projects
Yes, I have decided to start some side projects along the way towards completing Seasons.
The first one, thus far named Brickhouse is a modern-day/surreal/horror story set in corporate environs. It is not related to my previous effort, Building. I’m writing it in ALAN 3. It will be a game of medium length.
The next one is a dreamy/romantic/slice-of-life story called New Cat. I’m writing this one in Inform 7. It will be a medium-short game.
Why am I doing this? Am I glutton for punishment? Have I no life at all? Leaving those questions as merely hypothetical ones, I did want to learn other IF programming languages to see how well they stacked up to Inform 6. I also have the feeling that Inform 7 is probably ready for prime time.
So here goes nothing. I’ll be keeping myself on track here as usual.
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Delayed Due to Theft
I’m going to have to push back Seasons another month or two, because my primary development machine — a graphite iBook 466 — was stolen. I’ve already forgiven the thief, but it’s also humorous, especially given that he didn’t get the power cable. Can you imagine his surprise when he opens it up and finds out that it’s running OS 9.2.2? *shaking head* He’s definitely in over his head. Meanwhile, I’ll see what I can do on my other old-skool Mac, a PowerTower Pro with a G3 1 Ghz upgrade in it. I think I’m going to get another graphite iBook, though. In terms of usability, ergonomics, and just downright coolness, Apple hasn’t made a better laptop since.
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Not Down and Not Out
I haven’t posted lately because I haven’t had any great insights or great pains concerning IF in general. I’ve just been making slow, steady progress on Seasons. I’ve managed to get in less than an hour/day during the week, but I usually hit 4-5 hours/day on the weekends. That hasn’t been enough to prevent schedule slip, and so now I’m looking at the end of the year, with a strong possibility of spring ‘09.
Still, it’s been easier for me to focus on the game when I don’t have other things draining or inflaming me, and the IF scene was always that way. Maybe it’s just me, but the rare frissions of belonging never balanced out or atoned for all the negatives. I’m not a pessimist, but I have come to understand some things about communication, which is why I don’t see myself participating much in R*IF again. These are the four communicative truths:
- Few people care about what you say
- Those who do care and correctly understand (not misinterpret) what you say are fewer still
- Those who care, understand, and agree are fewest of all
- You have no real ability to convince anyone of anything. People only come to understand or agree with something through their own reasoning or through divine conviction
All that remains for us to do, then, is to build it and tell others about it. The like-minded will be drawn to it.
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Graphs as Motivation
As the old saw goes, what gets measured, gets done. I have a hard time motivating myself for what seem epic tasks, so I devised a graph to measure the amount of time I was developing the game each week. Motivation is a problem for independent game developers of all stripes. This is one of my kick in the pants to keep myself on track.
I hit some low spots lately due to playing bass in a band and feeding my anime` addiction. I know that and can flagellate myself all day, but looking at it on a graph shows me the impact to the game that these other activities have.
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On My Way to the IF Workshop
It never fails. As soon as I confidently declare some percentage done to anyone but myself, something awful goes wrong. Here I am, feeling that all’s well in my corner of the world and I go on bragging to Jim Aiken (IF Workshop leader) that I’m X% done and have conquered the game’s technical problems. Then BAM! The conversation system goes belly-up, and that’s the first puzzle.
Actually, it had gone belly-up some time before, but I just assumed that it would work if I made it more like the conversation system in Medusa (y’know, with queries). Wrong. It turns out that the only way I can make it work is if every topic is a Tell topic, and that no queries are used at all. That was my original design, but it felt hollow. I guess I have to go with it now and see if I can stomp out the bugs swirling around it by Saturday at the latest.
I’m going to tell people to focus on Spring, I think. It’s not done, but it has more solvable puzzles than any other season. I still think I’m right around the half-way mark, but most of my work has been technical and not plot or characterization, yet. That still fits with what I’m going to ask for help on, because I’d like for Seasons to turn out with a stronger narrative than Building.
And I lied. I now have 214 rooms. *chagrined stare*.
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213 Rooms
Wow. I didn’t expect there to be so many rooms, but last night, I finished the maps and counted the rooms, which allowed me to get a better handle on the project. I might shed or add a few rooms, especially in Autumn, which is currently larger than the other seasons, but 213 is a firm number. The number of rooms will not be more than this.
The strange thing is that due to the sectioned nature of this game, 213 doesn’t feel like a lot of rooms. I plan on introducing touchback points that the PC can return to by typing a single word, so hopefully it won’t feel like the game is too large to the players, either. (I think that system, rather than having every single room as a touchback point, is an acceptable compromise between having to go to every room directly and being able to go to every room by typing its name.)
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Playing With Fire
I think I’ve just entered the IF version of Mordor, where little lights mark all the IF developers who died attempting to make it through this problem. Their uneasy spirits linger on in old threads found only through searching Google groups. So what is all this about? I have found fire, and have discovered one thing. Fire hurts.
Inform 6 is a great programming language, and I mean that with no sense of understatement or backhanded mockery. I enjoy it. However, it does not handle fire very well. Due to the disruptive nature of fire, though, I doubt that any programming language could implement it at all well.
Fire can change the properties of any given object in many ways, depending on the state of the object, the intensity of the fire, and the proximity of the object to the fire. Furthermore, it can utterly transmute the object from existence to dust, and do the same for NPCs and the player.
In a moment of utter design revelation, I managed to cut out the necessity for an exhaustible light source from Seasons. However, there is still at least one fire in the game, and with that one fire, comes all the problems with lighting, burning, flammability, and so forth. I’m not obsessive, but I recognize that saying “You can’t burn that!” to something that’s obviously capable of being burned will send players into spasmodic fits of Tourette’s syndrome. So I have to design classes for flammable objects, handle burn and light (which I’ve decided are not the same), extinguishing, and the whole kit and caboodle.
I’m not thrilled by all this, but I cannot remove the fires from the game, so onward into IF Mordor I go. I’ll release my framework as “fire.h” when this is all said and done, even though I know it’ll never make it to the level of official extension. Don’t ask me to elaborate on that one. Just don’t. It’ll be on intaligo.com, though, where all my offerings live.
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Construction From Random Fixations
I’ll admit that I’m not the most ordered when it comes to constructing my games, and by construction, I mean the phase that follows design. My designs are well-ordered: I know about how many rooms, the theme(s), the style, the main character, the technology. Construction, however, results from random fixations. Today I choose to work on this piece, then tomorrow that piece, then the third day oh wait I left something out in piece one, and then it’s on to piece four. Stitch this together with oodles of alpha testing and you have my process, such as it is.
I’d like to think that this results in a well-tested game, but that wasn’t so the first time around. Eventually, like with works of creative writing, I became so utterly tired of the whole thing that I let it go before its time had come. It’s more of a way of preventing boredom from setting in, although there may be some quixotic fear of commitment or lack of discipline in the mix, too. I’m afraid of making my art feel too much like actual work, so I zip from here to there and cobble this or nail together that.
All of that is to say I don’t have a definite grasp on where Seasons is, besides a rough percentage complete. I last incremented the version number some months ago, even though the game has been polished immeasurably since then and has many fewer missing pieces. Without giving away too much, multiple layouts in Gwindows are working and I’ve managed to make Gwindows play nicely with OrLib. (No, you cannot know my incantations yet!)
The downside to this mode of development is that I often work for days or weeks without feeling that I’m accomplishing much. The question haunts me: “Does setting smaller goals and achieving them make constructing the game feel too much like work?” Tough one, that.
Anyhow, I think I’m right around the halfway mark.
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