This is an archive, stream of consciousness style, devblog of my adventures trying to code up a game for the first time.

That deadline is looking far too close for comfort.

Took a lot of effort but I'm finally working on this again. Usually I don't go back to projects once I set them done, but I just have to get this finished–if only for myself. Going back over the writing makes me realize how awful it really is. Maybe its just my own cynicism, but I feel like anyone playing this game will think its super superficial. One thing I've noticed about "the internet" is that they like to avoid personal conflict or anything that is emotional. Yes, they like to build up fires and dig graves, but if its an emotional story dealing with personal mind games they stay away like its the plague.

I'm rewriting the text. Placing 29 lines by hand was going to be time consuming, but not especially difficult. Since I'm trying to stay away from the one-liner approach because the writing is horrible and I can't convey what I want to without seeming superficial or empty. Writing a functioning text editor isn't something I wanted to do with this project. It's one of those unexpected things nobody tells you about when creating a video game. I have the methods to place text in a given position, including wrapping a line if it exceeds the width of the window. All I need to add is automatic centering (justification) and placement. I may have to scale the text down 75% to get what I want in there.

Now I have to back to the drawing board. I still am not 100% on the story I want to tell. The general emotions I want to convey are there, but the words I want to use are not. I'm thinking about going along a theme of rememberance, but I don't know if I can pull it off–I'm not actually that great of a writer. This is important for me to get right, and I don't want the player to callously dismiss this just because there aren't any explosions and I'm trying to reach to the heart of the matter.

Let's just ignore level design for now–that's not going places as fast as I want it to. There are still unimplemented elements, but I haven't designed enough levels to get to that point yet.