I sat down to work on this game before Christmas, having powered through the inconveniences that threatened to impinge my week of thinking time. I relaxed, which my body took as permission to submit to bronchitis, so everything but my cough has been quite unproductive lately.
Still, not only was my written evidence to the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee accepted, it sits at the top of the download list, simply for being the last submission. That particular administrative mess began shortly before the first development diary, and suffice to say, it's hard to call which of these two projects will conclude first.
The game systems are more prosaic than mysterious. Having settled on documenting before coding, to the extent that I haven't written one line of Python since July, describing those systems is a dry, exacting process. The basis of the scripting language is now well defined, the page data format isn't quite there yet, while the grids and grid components defining the game world are my current focus.
I have almost settled on grids being two-dimensional objects, with special connections linking grids at different elevations. Movement between points on a grid is now represented by vectors, with a limited set of diagonals permitted that won't require any floating point calculations. Blockages will be most likely be represented by global door objects, but that concept will be revisited once pathfinding through immutable links has been explored on paper.
The later step is to return to the rendering code, partly tying older routines together and writing some new ones too. This all seems far more modular than designing the world which defines what needs rendering at any moment, so I'm sticking with doing the hardest part first.
In the meantime, after giving priority to the salaried work that funds my weird experiments, I will set some serious time aside to prepare for Chunky Fringe next year. This has accidentally become part of the main event, which people are paying folding money to see, so they at least deserve a semi-professional approach. Besides, I could do with the practice of finishing to a deadline.
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