Design and documentation journal for my interactive fiction (text games); also reviews and other miscellaneous stuff.

Friday, December 11, 2009

FTA Update

Busy few weeks, with the holiday and all. I'm not feeling inclined to do much programming, so I've been trying to figure out how to implement some larger systems, and occasionally doing some research, like how long a bar of soap might last someone, or what conditions make seeds less viable. Stuff that may or may not make it in, but stuff I think is interesting to know.

I don't think I'll be working on a game for the jayisgames comp - right now I'm pretty overwhelmed with real life stuff, and the one idea I had that I liked requires some significant research to pull off properly. I did have a second idea for a zombie game in a science lab, where you have to combine chemicals to kill the zombies, but the implementation thing pretty much killed the game before I got started. Besides, since zombies don't breathe, most of the reactions I was considering were explosions. Cool, but not what I had in mind. Maybe I'll resurrect the idea at a later date.

Trying to figure out equations for the variables for plants and how they contribute to real life conditions is killing me. I'll probably only be implementing these slowly, but it would be nice to have a goal to work toward. I really need to go back over my statistics books and look at the equations - I think there's some helpful stuff in there, even if I don't include them directly.

My first seed catalogs have been coming in, too, so I've been scanning them, trying to glean potential alleles to include. The Fedco seed catalog has a pretty helpful potato primer - critical variables, including taste, plus a nice table of which varieties have what.

Last, but not least, my "idea" document has gotten really unwieldy, as it's split between several different files and some handwritten notes, with no real order, so I plan to type and reorganize (and upload) it at some point soon.