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

Sunday, March 6, 2011

FTA Update (3/6)

Not much actual work-work this week.  I did some work on the graphical stuff that I am tentatively pleased with but is extremely unfinished; I'm basically sitting on it for a week or so to see how I like it, since its adoption means creating a non-trivial number of sprites and then doing a bunch of tedious implementation stuff.  Also, thanks to the interlibrary loan, I got my hands on a copy of Vegetation of Wisconsin, which was written in 1956, but is extremely detailed and helpful - he gives some very helpful numbers and breakdowns, as well as listing species that will be very helpful when the time to write descriptions comes along.  (It's also really good for suggesting location names; all kinds of glades and groves and sinkholes.)  I also spent a couple hours on the help, filling in actions and their specs.  It feels weird to write a general informational paragraph about "taking".  The worst part is knowing that I'll need to revisit these pretty frequently to refine/add stuff, but it'll be nice to get them to an alpha level. 

I still need to fix hunting, which is kind of hanging out unfinished.  And I found an issue with the sleep code; since the game never forces you to sleep, you can go indefinitely, and then if you ever do sleep, you'll make up all that sleep at once, which can be thousands of hours.  Oops.  (Fortunately, you can't starve to death now, either, so . . . )

Which reminds me: I need to create some sort of sleep debt system, and probably also make the PC collapse from exhaustion eventually.  The same sort of thing needs to happen for eating, incidentally; right now, the game will stop you from eating if you're too full, but "full" is directly tied to "having enough calories".  I'm thinking of a sort of bank account for calories; at the end of each day, the PC's surplus or deficit over his daily needs is socked away; if the deficit is too low, the PC starves, and if it's too high, the surplus is lost.  That does have the downside of having the PC starve to death at the same time each day, which is not awesome; maybe there can be an hourly starvation check or something.

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