What has been happening the past few weeks/months since I last posted?

Lots. So many lots that I have to compile a list for you, in point form!

• I started working on that real document for the game. It’s still pretty messy with a lot of missing stuff, but it’s a pretty big start to having a cohesive design document.
• A side effect of this real document work is that a lot of the design of the game, on the story side at least, is really starting to get more fleshed out.
• I’ve been working on the code pretty solidly. I’ve added a few core features like animating bitmaps and mouse input, and have gone through all our objects and added reads and writes to their variables, so now the current test levels (and conceivably, any future levels) are loaded from files. This is a pretty big deal, as it lays some fundamental groundwork for the level editor.
• We’ve settled on a fortnightly meeting of The Game Group ™, which at the moment consists of me, the Kristov, Rai (conceptual/3D character artist), Alex (3D artist), Ban (3D level builder/artist), and our newest member, Ken (conceptual artist) – and we’ve laid out a timeline for what’s needed for the completion of the first take.

So, things are going swimmingly. Or are they? Duhn duhn duhn…

Well, while things are going well, I definitely feel like, particularly on the story side, there’s definitely a yawning chasm between what we currently have, and what I eventually envision the game to be. This is okay – however, I’m getting to a point, both on the code side and the story side, where I’m not sure how exactly to work towards the vision, so it ends up being something close to what we’re planning.

I guess what I’m worried about is, I’m working every night on either the code or the story, background and characters for the game – however, as I start to nail down systems and cultures, what the game can ultimately become is narrowed down… and if we find out later that the stuff I’ve been doing for however many months is limiting us from achieving what we really wanted to achieve with the game, we either have to decide to cut this work and start from scratch, or salvage, and deal with the fact that the game is going to be very off target.

My thoughts at the moment for the solution to this problem? Pushing blocks.

That is, what I need is more prototyping. Instead of building a bunch of tech and story towards a game that may never happen, I should spend more effort on simply making what we’ve currently got better.

This IS what the whole Take structure was for, I guess. However, I think that what I’ve lost sight of a bit is that, within the Take structure, we should be looking at as much prototyping as possible, and constantly looking back at the game, at what we currently have, and seeing what modifications we need to do to that to steer it towards our final goals.

And it also means that I’ll be looking closely at the gameplay and the game quite a bit more. What currently happens within the game, and how to add to that and change that, to start moving it towards what we want it to do.