There’s a new entry on my to-do list that is depressing the crap out of me.
The entry is “make chapter 1 not suck balls” + row of sad smileys.
Once upon a time, in my dim and distant past, I attempted to make Delia Smith’s Chocolate Hazelnut Meringue Roulade. You’d have thought I’d have recognised from the get go that this thing was way out of my cooking league. I mean there are FOUR SEPERATE ITEMS in the title alone. And I’m a low level cook, I need to make simple things, with only one or two words in the title. This like: scrambled eggs, steak, onion pie, chocolate cake. But, anyway, high on cooking hubris I decided to make this thing and, actually, it came out okay and the bit where you spread your roulade layers on greaseproof paper and roll ’em up is super fun but you’ll get how hardcore this recipe is when I tell you there’s a throwaway line in the middle of the instructions that reads simply “fold the ground hazelnuts into the meringue.” Do WHAT with the WHAT?
With cooking, as with erecting flatpacked furniture, there are two schools of thought. One school of thought suggests you should read the instructions carefully in advance so you know exactly what you’re doing at all times. And the other school of thought, um, doesn’t do any of that. You can probably guess which school I attend. So the whole “hey, make meringues right now bitch” aspect of the recipe came at me out of nowhere. I think recipe steps should be things like “add sugar to flour” or “dust steak with pepper.” Make meringues IS a recipe already.
And don’t get me wrong, meringues is pretty simple if you have fair warning, a food processor or an electric whisk.
What I had was a fork.
Forty minutes later I had made meringues and was prepared to fold in the hazelnuts.
But my spirit was totally broken.
And, unfortunately, “ make chapter 1 not suck balls” is the “make meringues” of this whole enterprise. The thing is, chapter 1 does what I want it to do, it’s straightforward and introductory, and it’s meant to be, but it’s also really clumsily executed. It’s riddled with bugs because I made a real hash of designing and scripting things with any sort of coherence and, maybe I’m just being a paranoid artiste (dons beret) but I think you can sort of feel that coming through the gameplay. The quest flow isn’t quite ‘right’ and everything is just a bit awkward and disjointed. It’s also really difficult to fix it because it’s all so embedded in, um, itself. You can’t unravel one mess without making about 600 other messes.
That’s the problem with long running projects. By the time you get to the end you hate the beginning.
For the moment, though, I’m just going to hide the problem in my to-do list and come back to it – hopefully.
If I ever get to the end.