Back when I first had the idea for my game, and had started laying out some graphics and some code, the storyline hit me. I think it was one of those things where your unconscious mind works on something in the background, and then all of a sudden it just pops out.

Anyway, I just typed and typed for a good hour or so, and it poured out of me pretty much done. And then I simply put it on the shelf, (a project subfolder) and set to work on making the game.

And now that I'm nearly ready to release my masterpiece, I've decided to put a "story" button in the title menu. And that's where the real work has now begun, because coding and animating a story or a cutscene in GM is not easy.

No timeline GUI, no canned animation movements, no friendly structured graphics routines like in flash. My first impulse was to do the whole thing in After Effects and Premiere Pro, which is what I do for my day job anyway. The problem with that is that at this stage of the game I'm trying to keep the download small, and a video clip like that would be huge. Eventually I may go that route, but to begin with I wanted something small, and something that is mostly in code and sprites.

So what to do? I am almost done building a custom text reader that will take a text file and scroll at the right pace and placed exactly within the box I want it to be in on the screen. I've recorded the voice-over and the sound effects, mixed in music, and have a good audio track. But am I done?

Nope. Nah. No. So who cares about my self-imposed deadline? That's what makes Blizzard so great- their moniker is "We'll ship it when it's done."

That's good advice.