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.
Generally felt unmotivated and without a lot of creative juice. I still got a lot done, through effort rather than inspiration, though somewhat less of it was narrative, and more of it was code.
Almost all of the code work this week happened in the story-compiler.
You see, I had this epiphany – which I should have had quite a lot sooner.
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!).
I have a chart of the way scenes branch in the SNAFU story. You might have looked at that and thought “Well, that looks a tad complex” – or maybe you didn’t. Maybe you thought it looked quite straightforward compared to branching fiction that you’re familiar with.
For a refresher, this is a chunk of the diagram:
It has grown a little since then. The thing is, that traditionally, the scene is the “atomic” node of choice-based interactive-fiction, and that is not the case here.
Argus, regrettably, doesn’t have a specialised authoring tool – not yet, anyway. Authoring is done with just a text editor. Within the last few days, I’ve added file-inclusion, so that I’m no longer chasing my tail across 13,000 lines of source-text trying to find a particular scene. More on the files later.
If I had to characterise the project, I’d call it “stupidly ambitious.”
