Thursday, October 2, 2008

Junction City

Another bad week, though not as bad as last week, and at least one critical milestone reached: the story sequence right in the middle of the game is coded, which means the game's now playable from start to finish.

chocolate

By "coded" I mean "mostly coded": I still have the stupid habit of putting characters into traps without figuring out how they'll escape, so the end of this scene is, um, a little bit weak. I also need to throw in/steal some little visual effects like a "quake" function and a "trail bloody footsteps as you stagger to your death" function (or something reasonably similar.) And by "playable" I meant "not actually playable", since there's a critical bug if you don't have Cass with you in the final sequences and I haven't yet thrown in the code to have Cass join up with you after you leave town--which means that you can get to the game's ending and then you can't actually see it. Rad!

Still: it's some kind of tangibly right-direction step. I don't know what it is lately--once I stop worrying about money this is going to go faster. When will I stop worrying about money? Will I ever?

Oh also: a new battle theme is in the game, courtesy of Long! I kind of need to get used to it like I'm used to vangelis.mod as battle music, but the new battle music is (1) better and (2) not stolen from probably multiple sources.

I was having dinner with my writer friend Billy on Wednesday and he asked about this game, surprisingly, since I think the last time I talked to him about it was back in July or something. I said that I was still working on it, and that coding story sequences was like writing novels, except instead of just writing what the characters do, you have to construct robots of the characters and program them to function in simple ways, and then assemble the film stock of them functioning in simple ways yourself. I said you can work for hours to create a one minute scene which you will then watch over and over again forever with joy and love that no one else in the world will share. Lord love video games