Development Progress Report, week 55

Nothing especially exciting to report this week, but there is a picture!

The narrative has topped 255K words (as you see in the image above), so that’s progressing slowly. I’ve also been working a little on trying to get the story-compiler to output some useful additional information.

Aside from the data you see above, the compiler can also output the overall scene linkages by producing a twine-compatible file.

Until now, though, the node-placement hasn’t been very good, which has produced diagrams that have been essentially useless – or worse than useless.

Finally, I’ve gotten around to revisiting that, and managed to get it to produce a scene-structure diagram (up to the early parts of Chapter Two) that actually makes a bit of sense. Kind of. If you know what you’re looking at, I suppose. The node-layout still isn’t perfect, but it’s workable. You can click on it for a larger version.

scenegraph1

This doesn’t account for all manner of variations within scenes and branching within scenes, but gives a broader conceptual look at the godawful mess of scenes and the orders that they might be executed in.

As for the narrative itself, I’m discovering that individual phrases and clauses in some parts of the prologue have been edited and reedited enough times that the actual overall grammar of certain sentences has gotten muddled. That’s all being reworked. If you’re alpha-testing and you see a rubbish sentence, let me know!

Hopefully, there’s more exciting stuff to report next week. In the meantime, if you have any questions, you can ask me on Twitter.