Getting closer now. The last time I wrote was during the peak of the intensity on the project: An awful lot left to do in a very short amount of time. Now there's much less time, but also much less to do. My days are still unexpectedly long and it's becoming harder and harder to explain exactly how it is that I'm filling them up so quickly. However, there's an unlimited amount of time I could be spending just playing this game at this point, now that it's more or less done, and I'm making time for that.
Let me record my recent thinking on the game, since it's subject to change later, especially once my impressions of it start being colored by other people's impressions: In this moment, I like this game. I have fun playing it. At last I can say these things truthfully. That's all I wanted to be able to say at the end of this process. My ambitions are simply to be able to keep saying this about different games I work on over time.
Granted, part of the reason I like this game is because it includes a lot of ideas I like. But, by now, it also has some of those special qualities that I believe are required of good games. Little moments that we didn't have to put in, and little interactions that are there to reward you for noticing them. Just today I was able to make what, in the grand scheme of things, is a very minor adjustment to one of the missions in the game. It consisted of several lines of XML, two images measuring less than 100KB in total, and three lines of additional text. And though this change was primarily intended to address a clarity issue at the beginning of a mission, it had the side-effect of making our lead designer bust up laughing as soon as he saw it in action.
There are probably a couple of thousand such moments possible in this game. If players can successfully experience, say, at half of one percent of those moments, I think there's a good chance they'll come away with a positive impression overall. But we'll see.
My mood runs hot and cold these days. Since we made good progress this week, for the moment I'm feeling cautiously optimistic. Moments to be savored.
Or maybe it's all the Samurai Shodown II I've been playing late at night these days. Soon now I'll get to catch up on my backlog of all those other games I should've been playing, but yeah, at least I can say I'm not having to play some piece of shit while I miss out on them for a little while longer.
Let me record my recent thinking on the game, since it's subject to change later, especially once my impressions of it start being colored by other people's impressions: In this moment, I like this game. I have fun playing it. At last I can say these things truthfully. That's all I wanted to be able to say at the end of this process. My ambitions are simply to be able to keep saying this about different games I work on over time.
Granted, part of the reason I like this game is because it includes a lot of ideas I like. But, by now, it also has some of those special qualities that I believe are required of good games. Little moments that we didn't have to put in, and little interactions that are there to reward you for noticing them. Just today I was able to make what, in the grand scheme of things, is a very minor adjustment to one of the missions in the game. It consisted of several lines of XML, two images measuring less than 100KB in total, and three lines of additional text. And though this change was primarily intended to address a clarity issue at the beginning of a mission, it had the side-effect of making our lead designer bust up laughing as soon as he saw it in action.
There are probably a couple of thousand such moments possible in this game. If players can successfully experience, say, at half of one percent of those moments, I think there's a good chance they'll come away with a positive impression overall. But we'll see.
My mood runs hot and cold these days. Since we made good progress this week, for the moment I'm feeling cautiously optimistic. Moments to be savored.
Or maybe it's all the Samurai Shodown II I've been playing late at night these days. Soon now I'll get to catch up on my backlog of all those other games I should've been playing, but yeah, at least I can say I'm not having to play some piece of shit while I miss out on them for a little while longer.
