I was away in the Lake District for the weekend, during which time I accidentally locked the blog. If I had any readers, I’d apologise but thankfully that’s not a concern.
I’m feeling quite proud of myself (no, I don’t have a cat to represent this, just at the moment) because I’ve made relatively good progress on the module. I took today away from work in order to recover from having been in the Lake District and basically bashed away like a goodun for a shaming number of hours. I’ve been chipping away, here and there, for what feels like weeks and weeks and not really getting anywhere. I like to think I laid the groundwork for today’s burst of activity but I secretly suspect modding is one of those things that actually requires vast swathes of concentrated time, and doesn’t adapt easily to picking up and putting down.
I also encountered an infuriating issue – I must have done Something Bad TM because the module started deciding (okay, it didn’t ‘decide’, I need to accept it doesn’t have agency, or malice) to crash on loading. And I couldn’t work out what had led to this, or what was causing it, which meant I lost several hours to the painstaking deconstruction of everything I had previously painstakingly built in an effort to find what was causing the problem. This felt like taking my soul apart a block at a time but the most toe-curlingly humiliating thing about the whole fetid business is that I STILL haven’t found the source of the crash.
I kept thinking I’d found it, and I’d start work again, only to have the crash recur. It was like it was laughing at me, I swear. I’ve managed to get everything fixed, and there has been no re-appearance of the crash, but I feel like pure distilled fail because I neither isolated the problem, nor fixed the problem, nor understood the problem. I just managed, in the course of my flailings, to make the problem go away.
I guess I should just be grateful for small mercies.
The crash has, after all, gone back to whatever circle of hell originally spawned it.
I’ve been working on an area called the Graegholt, which is actually a huge sprawl of place. I wanted to have a bit of a change of pace, since normally my areas are quite constrained and linear. This is partly a consequence of ineptitude, partly a consequence of laziness and partly a meaningful decision to impose a sense of limitation and constriction on the player. But, yeah, I decided to just create a place with stuff in it – optional stuff, that is. You can just arrive, do what has to be done, and bugger off.
I suppose one of the indulgences in working only for yourself is that you can get away with high quantities of optional content. There’s been very little of this in RPGs I have played recently – even down to things like dialogue trees being more like dialogue sticks, since there’s been practically no branching in them. And I can see why, as a professional game designer with an eye to the numbers in the right-hand column, you’d have to do that – since content that is seen only by a fraction of your players is essentially content (and therefore time and money) wasted. But since it’s only me, and money isn’t an issue, and my time is my own anyway, and since my playbase is 2 (three if you include myself) I’m at liberty to waste as much of my own damn time as I please.
Unknown State in Compiler 