writing

These are the feed posts that use the “writing” tag:

2025-01-20 16:52: Quoll Work Thread, 2025-01-20 #2

OK, and that’s everything scaffolded, though I eventually started skipping writing tests because I realized that what tests I need will depend a lot on what exactly I write. Nonetheless, I kicked off a test run because I do think I have some tests where I ask questions that will now be handled by these rules. A search shows that I have 92 individual responses to write, though some of them I have already written nearly two years ago; they are just in my Scrivener file.

2025-01-20 10:32: Quoll Work Thread, 2025-01-20

Allow me to make an exception to my normal rule about not making these comments on real-life.

I read yesterday about the idea that when Martin Luther King, Jr. talked about having his dream, that perhaps it really was a dream given to him at night to see the future. A gift passed from the ancestors to strive forward to a better day for someone one day, even when things look at their bleakest. But at the same time, also a dream in its figurative sense of being a hope.

I too, have this hope, and I did have a bit of a dream reigniting that hope a few days ago. It made me cry when I woke up, but I feel emboldened by it as a vision I hope to see one day.

I also have a hope to finish my game, so let’s focus on that first…

2025-01-19 14:30: Quoll Work Thread, 2025-01-19 #2

It’s time for a bit of a break! I first wrote up a whole new extension to contain all my Subjects that are shared conversation topics because before now I had mostly very specific contextual Subjects that best belonged where they are used, like GNBSP-1-Taffification-Subject that represents taffification. And then I tried to add a Default Response for Glitch for when there is no prepared Response, but I ran into an interesting problem testing this…

2025-01-19 13:11: Quoll Work Thread, 2025-01-19

The tomorrow I mentioned yesterday is here! I have about 36 responses that I want to scaffold today. Part of me is thinking that I should just go ahead and start writing them, but I do think it has been good for me to do my testing against a scaffold so it's there to work with/expand on when I am actually writing/implementing. But that means I should get on that scaffolding.

2025-01-18 18:03: Quoll Work Thread, 2025-01-18 #2

Despite how long it has been since I made an update, the trough is not quite full yet, because I had a handful of new subjects that required a bit of complicated testing. Namely, that I wanted to have Ada be able to ask the location of a few important rooms for the optional puzzle, and added a stub description for the door to Taffany’s room. It’s not really that these took me that long, just that I was also pulled away to do some housework I wanted to get done and other self-care stuff like going to the bathroom…

2025-01-18 14:11: Quoll Work Thread, 2025-01-18

Yesterday was a hangover from staying up too late playing Victoria 3, but today is open for working on Quoll and I am a few dozen scaffolding of responses away from being full on writing. I actually did a bit of prep work before this, mainly deciding what exact topics I want to have responses for and which characters should respond on which topics. I actually ended up with 36 new responses I need to scaffold, which is quite a bit, but I think it will be a great space to expound upon the world and begin to introduce more of the narrative strokes of this zeroth entry in the game series.

2024-12-30 23:53: Mahjong Story Work Thread, 2024-12-30 #2

OK, I got pulled away by therapy, doing some new job onboarding stuff, and a couple of naps, but I have finally finished outlining the full game!

2024-12-30 09:11: Mahjong Story Work Thread, 2024-12-30

Look who’s up early! I definitely should be working on other things, but nonetheless I would love to finish up outlining this story, so I’m going to get on it, but I’m also going to talk some about how I’ve made decisions so far…

2024-12-29 20:06: Mahjong Story Work Thread, 2024-12-29 #3

I have outlined the east round of the game and it’s been real fun to have to figure out what I want to happen on each hand to cause events in the narrative, though I admit it definitely does not feel like a “real” game. But it’s not supposed to be, because this is a story and I want to have fun!

2024-12-29 16:07: Mahjong Story Work Thread, 2024-12-29 #2

OK, after some work I have written up a bit more on character profiles because even with how little I need to talk about Chimmy and Ada to write them, I wanted to decide on their playing styles and what fun forms they have decided to transform into. And I have a handful of other characters that I’ve pulled from elsewhere and one new character that will be the starting viewpoint character and the “normie” entry-point character (she’s also new to mahjong).

2024-12-29 14:23: Mahjong Story Work Thread, 2024-12-29

Things have been a bit up and down emotionally for me, though overall, I’ve had some good moments during the HOLIDAYS. Either way, I feel like I need to throw writer brain a bone and let her write about some furry bullshit that does not have to be massaged into interactive fiction, so I’m thinking of tackling a story about my fursonas hosting a mahjong night… with transformative results. (You can probably assume most of my stories have such results…)

2024-11-25 23:15: Quoll Work Thread, 2024-11-25 #2

OK it took me about 2 hours, but the implementation of Ada noticing her taffification went pretty smooth except for having to move a definition up in the code so it can be pre-declared and I could save a few lines. I’ve added one test to test and that seems to work fine. Nothing really too interesting to say, I cut my teeth on implementing something like this with the optional CD puzzle, which was way more intricate.

2024-11-25 20:58: Quoll Work Thread, 2024-11-25

Though I didn’t make a thread yesterday, I did indeed finish going through those changes and even ran into a cute implementation detail about Taffany I want to write up and explain. But regardless, I checked in the code to randomize Taffany’s gender after one more test run to catch all the skein generation artifacts. Today I am planning on moving on to having Ada eventually notice her taffification and alert the Playerr to it. Nothing to say about that until later, but the cute implementation detail is under the cut.

2024-11-24 00:56: Quoll Work Thread, 2024-11-23 #2

I’ve made my change to randomize Taffany’s starting gender, ran the tests as I watched the soccer game, and as I expected it caused a lot of RNG churn!

2024-11-23 19:31: Quoll Work Thread, 2024-11-23

It’s been a rather wild week since I last worked on Quoll, partially due to my choir’s concert, but in particular due to the big wind storm that hit the Seattle area. But things are beginning to return to normal here, and I have already wrapped up the work I was talking about last time, and am ready to tackle a few remaining things about Taffany and taffification while I watch some playoff soccer…

2024-11-18 18:41: Quoll Work Thread, 2024-11-18 #3

I did therapy and then ate some dinner and by that time my tests had finished and I was able to verify that everything looked right now, as well as fixing one more place where the RNG pulls had happened. Believe it or not, though, I’m running the tests one last time…

2024-11-18 14:53: Quoll Work Thread, 2024-11-18 #2

The tests have finished running after about exactly two hours, and I have figured out why I wrote my Farewell Responses with that pattern, and it actually has to do with the Node-Termination Responses!

2024-11-18 12:29: Quoll Work Thread, 2024-11-18

I was busy playing soccer on Sunday, and I actually was intending to try to take my newly found less sad brains and do some cleaning up around the house, but I also want to resolve the issues I am facing. And the way to do that is to do another test run…

2024-11-16 22:10: Quoll Work Thread, 2024-11-16 #3

I’m back from getting and eating food and watching some videos as the tests ran. And I began approving things when I noticed a little issue with implicit topics listing…

2024-11-16 19:40: Quoll Work Thread, 2024-11-16 #2

The good news is that I blessed the skein! The bad news is that in doing so I made a change that requires rerunning all the tests…

2024-11-16 18:39: Quoll Work Thread, 2024-11-16

I had a concert earlier today, and I want to decompress by blessing the new skein from my test run back on the 14th, and hopefully check in this big bunch of code I’ve been working on for a while covering the next bit of the tutorial.

2024-11-14 20:05: Quoll Work Thread, 2024-11-14 #2

Went on a good run through the TODOTODOs I had, and then got a bit bogged down in testing taffification of these responses.

2024-11-14 16:58: Quoll Work Thread, 2024-11-14

Unfortunately, I didn’t end up finding a game jam team and then I got in an anxiety funk (turns out that I am way low on vitamin D which is probably to be expected being a Black person in the PNW). To kind of break myself out of it, and get back to something I did want to work on, I’m doing some Quoll work.

2024-10-15 19:54: Quoll Work Thread, 2024-10-15 #3

After quite a bit more of work, I now have flavor text in for my main pathway that I’m testing and have created tests for the other three topics that Ada can ask about to advance the tutorial even though I’m putting off on writing the actual flavor until later. (I have a lot to do and it feels more like a job for writer brain than coder brain.)

However, given that I touched a few responses for the tutorial node before this as well as responses that should have been hit by other tests already, I think it’s a good time to run the tests and at least keep them up to see if I broke anything too serious, which will do it for me tonight, most likely.

2024-10-15 14:58: Quoll Work Thread, 2024-10-15 #2

A bit of a longer work session to start out with, but I wanted to get to a point where I had most of the flavor text in for the initial test of the scaffolding and could thus check in code since I had a lot in the air. But I’m going to have to make slight jaunt to handle some basic signalling around taffification.

WARNING: Might have a few light world spoilers for this part that I talk about.

2024-09-23 18:39: Quoll Work Thread, 2024-09-23 #3

This is a continuation from another post. Here is the first part of this thread. Here is the previous post of this thread.

I’m back after my nap and eating some food, and the next thing I’m going to try to work on has to do with some extra text substitution and variables Smarter Parser adds to grab relevant examples from around Ada to provide example commands.

2024-09-23 12:37: Quoll Work Thread, 2024-09-23 #2

This is a continuation from another post. Here is the first part of this thread.

OK, I’m finally done with writing all the responses and updating my tests to generally hit all of them. I’m glad to be done with them because partially as a stylistic choice, they are very repetitive. I hope the tone and repetitiveness contrasts well with Ada’s personable nature, making the Playerr feel more comfortable with her.

2024-09-23 10:58: Quoll Work Thread, 2024-09-23 #1

Welcome to the first non-introductory post on the website!

Over on Cohost, I got in the habit of doing actual blow-by-blow, real-time dev posts as I worked on my projects and while I don’t think it ever really had a big audience, I found it extremely helpful for my own needs, especially when a few months have passed and I don’t remember what I was thinking. I eventually want to pull over all of those posts here, but I can get to that later.