Quoll Work Thread, 2024-10-01 - 2024-10-01 18:07
While there is definitely still more to do with Smarter Parser, I think I really want to move back to pulling in more nodes of Glitch’s First Tutorial (which is actually the second one I’ve made because, see, because it’s a programming game, we start at zero). While I do think there’ve been enough delays in what I’ve gotten done that I am not going to make my loose deadline of mid-October, I think I can make good progress.
I’ve talked about my process in other places, I think, but in short the way that I work on this game is that I write an expected transcript in Scrivener, and then pull over what I have written into the source code and make it interactive. Of course, this process of making the transcript interactive takes a long time. In fact, I wrote all of the expected transcript for the first tutorial a year and a half ago, and while I got to some earlier nodes last year, I’m now getting to the rest of the nodes. There were some breaks from working on the game in that time, but the main issue is that the actual implementation of the cognitohazardous effect of one of the new NPCs took way longer than I ever expected for a host of different reasons that I covered as I ran into them in my posts over on the late Cohost.
Anyway, much as I have been doing, I am going to start by getting the basic “scaffolding” up without pulling in the flavor I have in the Scrivener document. This is especially necessary because this will be the first time that a tutorial requires you to talk to a different character than the skunktaur tutors, and I’m worried about how that will work.
So less chatting about it and more working on it.