Development is picking up again, with some actual measurable progress towards the next milestone. Despite, again, not being able to spend much time on it.
The narrative is up to 213,734 words, which is 5,081 words up from last week. A number of narrative glitches got fixed, and there’s only a few more character narratives to complete to close in on the target point of the narrative, that comprises the development-milestone.
I would like to have gotten more done during the week, but you can only do what you can do.
There have been some improvements to the story-compiler, mostly along the lines of efficiency, and improved error-checking (though that is far from perfect, as it is still possible to get logical and syntactical errors past it). More work required there.
Character knowledge-representation is nicely stable (and very fast!), though I can think of certain data-driven ad-hoc modifications to knowledge and inferences a story-writer (ie: me) might want to impose on the fly.
The sound-engine, I am increasingly of the opinion, needs to be thrown away and replaced. It was an off-the-cuff kludge, intended to see if I could properly include sound-effects and background music (there are only three bits of audio in the whole thing, and only one after gameplay actually starts). It’s well integrated with the story, but the code that drives the audio device is simply inadequate to the task, and not very portable. Later on, I’ll throw that away and produce something better. At that point, perhaps, some proper audio assets might get generated.
Once I’ve hit the milestone after this one, I’ll probably want to go back and rework some of the early character narratives a bit, now that the rest of the story is solidifying more.
It’s still early days, development-wise.