Quoll Work Thread, 2025-10-05 #2 - 2025-10-05 23:28
Guess what dingus realized she uploaded the previous blog post with the wrong link? Anyway, I have reached the end of implementing conversational affection, as well as making plushies People so they are open to conversational affection. Got to let my rat girl hug the plushies if they're going to be rudely sacrificed…
So to step back a bit and talk about my project management method, I use a lot of TODO comments in the code. A while back, as discussed in an old Cohost post, I began marking the relatively priority of TODO comments by adding more strings of TODO to them (explained here through examples):
[TODO: These are the lowest priority, I just want to fix them eventually, so I don't intend to fix them before this next
major release.]
[TODOTODO: These are the next prority, I want to fix them before the major release.]
[TODOTODOTODO: These are the max and thus current priority, I want to fix this before I commit the code.]
Well, that was the original intent at least. The truth is that I have been running into a new TODOTODOTODOTODO level, and even a TODOTODOTODOTODOTODO level! The last big feature I was working on was implementing a new character to the game that has a cognitohazardous effect on poor Ada, her created roommate for Glitch’s tutorial on Chronomancy. This is a silly idea I had that turned out to be way harder to implement and test than I expected. I first began implementing this effect back in December 2023, swinging in and out of it to try to get to a point where I had reached a point where all the engine implementation of the game, the setting up of the model game world, was “done”.
While doing this work, I have put off diving into writing, a much important part of this project that has given me so many ideas that they are leaking out of my head and into consensus reality (and vice-versa, pronounced “vee-chay vers-uh” because I am pretentious and think I’m so, so, so very smart). Like, I program professionally, and so programming has lost some of its luster, even though I still really enjoy doing it for projects I dig. I must write, dammit. I want to write wonderous text that will be read by you and conjure a world not unlike our own but with my two wonderful blorbos in it, that will make you feel an iota of what I feel in your awaiting hearts!
I have yet to really be an artist in such a very, very, long time. Most of what I’ve written for this game that will show up in the game was written back in March 2023, on a cutie tour I went on shortly after losing my job across this fine country by train. Do you realize how much more deranged reality has felt like to me in that time? How much god damn artistic anxious ambition there is in me‽
But, I lose myself. Let me refocus… Simply getting that effect led to then being able to implement an optional puzzle around the new character, the First part of Glitch’s Chronomancy tutorial (because the Zeroth part has already been given), pulling in bits of what I had written in the expected transcript I wrote in as I went along. I then had a few things after that I wanted to add that implied new features, such as this conversational affection, to allow you to command Ada to “HUG GLITCH” or “KISS DAISY”.
And that, got me down to were I have just a handful of quick and easy TODOTODOTODOs before I get to my set of TODOTODO where a large part of them are actually stub writing areas in the code such as:
Greeting Response for Daisy the Bunny:
"TODOTODO: Write Greeting Response for [short-name of the noun].".
However, I am also so excited to be there, because this is the truly fun part of making a narrative game to me. Programming can be fun, but I’ve been doing programming and testing on this major release since two and a half years, ago along with a host of ups and downs in my own life. The last release of this game, a minor release, was in January 2023, so just about three years ago by time of writing. You get kind of tired of dealing with Inform 7’s peculiarities after that amount of time, even with some huge breaks in there, such as most of 2024.
And now, I get to write and create. Fuck yeah.