This update is running a couple of days late, I know. I’ll try to blame the public holiday at the beginning of the week for that.
Alright, where are we at? Once again, a good week for development, though more on the narrative side than has happened in recent weeks.
It’s starting to look “like a bought one”, as they say.
Who says that? They do. You know, them. Heck, I just did, so me too.
There’s a lot to cover, so I’ll try to be brief. I will likely fail.
Due to Easter and other such complications, I didn’t end up posting a development update last week. It’s been a great fortnight, though.
Let me rummage through my notes and see what we’ve got.
Lots and lots of progress made this week, despite a weekend’s worth of development time lost to Stardew Valley. Oops! I suspect some of you are in the same boat.
Nevertheless, let’s get on to the good bits.
I missed last week’s development blog post due to the pressure of other things, so I’ve got two weeks to cover.
On the narrative side, I’m nearing a long-awaited story milestone. The prologues are complete for each of the eleven protagonists, and all but two of them are written through to the end of the rather dense and complicated first day of the story proper. Once those last two characters are written through, that will represent a major milestone.
That brings us to (today), 88 scenes and 232,814 words. That’s more than Dune (the book), or Neverwinter Nights (the game) [This isn’t a competition!], but we’re not really into the full swing of things yet. That will be in the second Act, which is where the bulk of the narrative technology should start to shine (I hope!).
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.
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.
