Um, yeah. So I missed my milestone. The levels aren’t all blocked out. This may be an issue, maybe not. We’ll find out. In any event, it occur ed to me that, yes, I do have the 1st level blocked out and yes, I do have some scripting in it, and yes, it does play pretty well and yes, I could polish that one level to perfection for IGF. OR I could move along and skip out on the glass and candy and get some goddamn stages built. I will always have time to add scripting and other fundamentally inconsequential crap to the game. I will not always have time to build levels from scratch. So today the plan is to draw out and begin to lay out the second stage. I already have a rough mock up with a critical path, I just need to finish it and get it into the game so people can play it. At this point, the talky bits are all secondary and I will put them in later. The goal now, like it was before I got sidetracked, is to finish the levels. I can then play test and generally make them all better afterwards, but polishing the Prison level for 2 months will get me nowhere.
-Ah, this morning I crushed a bug. Somehow, Zero would “float” when he would fall if you pressed a movement button. So a lethal fall became less lethal if you pushed a direction. This of course is a fundamental issue, as the distance of a lethal fall is integral to the gameplay and having it be all wishy washy is a little, well, dumb. So it was a Event Order issue, and it’s all better now.
-Speaking of talky bits, I think I have an idea. I built a FadeOut function that I like quite a bit, but there is no decent FadeIn function. The one I built doesn’t draw the background. I should add that to the function, that would be nice.
-Right, and School. It’s the fall again, which means that I get to enjoy the “Student” part of being an “Independent Student Developer.” This means 2 things. First, I will have less time to spend on the Project, but still want to keep the same schedule. Hence the, “Stop screwing around and work mentality.” I can’t waste my limited time on small things. The Second, is that I will have to try harder to make time for the wife. Yes, that is important too. After all, what’s the point of a Pyrrhic victory?