Cathode Tan - Games, Media and Geek Stuff
logo design by man bytes blog

Sunday, March 12, 2006

It's Hard Out Here For Writing Interactive Lit

Yeah, that's the kind of quality material on a pre-coffee Sunday morning.

But I'm sitting at the computer and we'll probably hit the gym soon and the The Girl will start using some mental power to get me to help clean something. So right now I've probably got a few free hours which really should be devoted to cleaning up the new form interactive fiction. The actual fiction is like 95% done. I have one page that probably needs a rewrite. Two, I think, two of the endings need to be "wired" to be properly interactive and then there are two or three thing. The hamster effect is starting to dig in, however, as it always does when I can start to see the light at the end of a something.

It's going to take a lot of editing and debugging. I might end up doing some kind of beta program.




tagged: ,

3 comments:

Josh said...

I think it will get there, because one advantage is the lack of any big problem which doesn't feel worth the effort to get over.

Like with the iTunes/game I was working on, a bug in GG"s code wasn't worth trying to fix because they were releasing an update, which somewhat shelved Atlas as well. My last Unreal project was facing big AI issues, etc.

Everything, for the most part, works as expected. Now it's just that "wanting to write" versus "time to write" problem.

Clamatius said...

The last 10% is always 90% of the effort. Actually shipping something that works and isn't totally trivial is invariably harder than you initially think.

And yeah, it's the niggling stuff that normally gets you down, not solving the hard problem.

Josh said...

Definately ... it usually goes down that the little stuff slows things to a crawl and then when I finally hit something hard again, that's just the rationale I need to shelve something.

Here it's looking I'd only have myself to blame.