Development time this week has been split pretty evenly between code and narrative.
On the code side, there’s a revamp of the narrative-display portion of the UI, plus countless little polishing tweaks, because a UI should not surprise you. Coupled with code-cleanups and optimisation, and that’s a lot of nearly invisible work, but work well worth doing.
On the narrative side, I’m extremely pleased to have now passed the quarter million word mark.
That’s a quarter of a million words!
There wasn’t a status report last week, because I was without electricity and an Internet connection, as a result of several days worth of getting the house rewired. Even this update is posted a day later than I’d intended.
That is past, and a lot got done during the rest of the time!
Continue reading Development Progress Report, weeks 20 and 21
Almost let the day get away from me without writing the update for Week 19. Project board says I’ve got 147 commits for the last 7 days, and closed all of my bugs (though a couple cosmetic ones turned up near the end of it).
Mostly this was an engine-work week again, so mostly working on Argus, rather than SNAFU, but SNAFU got some time as well.
Much progress this week. The SDL porting is essentially complete, and the code now also builds and runs on 64-bit Linux!
A whole lot of the code, and the drawing/rendering logic is a whole lot cleaner than it was, though there’s more that can be done there.
Coming out of the tangled and awkward mess that constitutes the usual (and I use the term advisedly), “festive season”, I’ve had my head down with a fairly major overhaul of the game-engine.
Once I started, it was hard to stop – particularly, since once I started, the engine was pretty much broken until I was mostly done. The primary work was converting to SDL (version 2, in case you’re wondering). I spent a couple hours figuring SDL out, then dove into the conversion.
The secondary work was just as interesting, as I started doing the necessary portability work to get the engine to build and run on other platforms.
Here’s SNAFU’s scene chart for what is officially ‘day one’ of the story. There’s stuff up above that, but that largely happens in prologue (some character narratives start earlier than day one).
(click the image for a larger view)
Heck, this isn’t really even day one, proper, all of this one starts late in the day. This is mostly just an evening of story, starting around dusk (except for scene 315 up near the top there, which is an afternoon scene).
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.
And we’re back after a gap of a couple of weeks. Melbourne International Games Week was a bust for me, thanks to some badly-timed medical problems, and a life-threatening illness in the family, which is no longer life-threatening, but still remains unidentified.
After a two-week gap, it has been a bit tricky to try to get back into things, but actually enough got accomplished to be well-satisfying.
A family medical crisis has blocked development last week and this week. Lots of running around and hospital stuff. Development week 14 will start as soon as it is practicable to do do so.
Well, as predicted, I didn’t end up with very much time to work on Argus and SNAFU this last week.
I did however, have a couple stretches (mostly on Saturday) where I was able to buckle down and really hammer away, though.
