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19.08.2022
This week was spent housesitting the same place where I wrote the original PRODUCER demo last year. This has caused me to fall back into last years (very bad) eating habits. My body does not like that. I still feel somewhat sick and strange. Meanwhile, being alone and full of sugar has lead to a damagingly productive week that I am very glad to leave far behind me.
I quickly realised that the great leap of progress from last week was not replicable because it came from many weeks of lackluster progress. It took me some time to get over this dissapointment, but then I managed to create a lot of lackluster stuff that will be really cool after a few more iterations.
It’s amazing how often I seem to have to relearn the basic fact that making games is so extremely iterative. Whenever I think I am done, I have actually just made the first version and will soon learn of it’s deficiencies. Of course I can’t just keep iterating on every part of the game forever, but one or two passes over every dialogue, artwork and puzzle are absolutely necessary.
I have not managed to discover any more dialogue patterns or structures that allow for fast copy-pasting from doc to engine, but I have written large chunks of dialogue that I consider final_final2.
The varying system turned out to be extremely effective at creating dynamic open world type conversation branches, which is very reassuring. The NPCs, sequences and rewards now all have to be funneld through these system and are therefore easier to write.
The game is also really congealing around a few hyper-reactive parts. Here, the game has to know about a lot about your actions (not just decisions), forcing me to continually update them as the rest of the game is written. As soon as a specific action is referenced in these hyper reactive parts, it has to be locked-in semi-permanently. The game is so far along now that even smaller changes are becoming prohibitvely expensive. In terms of themes, the current “AI” discourse is providing me with a lot of insanity that can be worked seamlessly into one of the three questlines of the 2nd act. Thanks nerds!
I also spend some time on
All of this was done in a kind of haze, under intense august heat and continued exposure to horrible food. I eventually got slightly sick and feverish and took some time off to continue on my overlong Forest Swords X Princess Mononoke AMV, a bad replacement for work, as it also involves sitting in front of a computer all day.
I am now looking forward to a long, physically active weekend full of human contact and non-shit food.
Cheers, Josh