Well, I can definitely say the last few days since I set this blog up (have I mentioned yet how much I hate the word "blog" – it's at best a pseudo-hip word, kind of like "fro yo" and "J Lo", and really sounds vaguely disgusting) have not been spent doing any Jen's Quest, er, Chimera Angel programming.

Eh, I've been calling it Jen's Quest for too long to just forget that name, so I'll probably use the two interchangeably for at least a little while.

Anyway, so what have I been doing? Well, a lot of it has been setting up the website. I'll probably upload a better placeholder shortly, one that looks more like what the site will look like when I have more time to get it exactly how I want it.

I've also been working on some details about how a part of the game is going to play out. The two biggest snags in getting anywhere on this game have been story and puzzles. The story part I have had a handle on for a long time. It was a major problem back in the old days (hard to believe it's been 8 years since I was a freshman in college). When I created the first Jen's Quest demo, I threw it together in a short period of time, making up what story was there virtually as I wrote the code. That is obviously an unsustainable way of creating a game, so I predictably hit a brick wall.

But most f the work that has gone into the game since the first demo was released has been story stuff. Remember the dinner scene in the first demo? Well, it's not really a "scene", but you know what I mean. See, in the first demo, I was going nuts breaking the fourth wall all over the place, which is bad enough, but the text boxes that were displayed for the dinner scene said that the dinner with Jennifer's parents wasn't "relevant at all". What a freakin' amateur I was.

Well, I'm using this scene as an example - in the final version of Chimera Angel, you will see Jennifer go to dinner with her parents. You will see exactly what she and her parents say to each other, and it serves as a scene to establish who these people are. In other words, it's very relevant, and there's some story there that I hadn't even conceived when the first Jen's Quest demo was released. Story isn't the problem.

Since I got the story fleshed out, the big problem has been puzzles. Simply put, designing puzzles is pretty hard if you've never done it before. I obviously want to avoid the problem that a lot of fan-made games have where most of the puzzles involve using some trivially-fetchable object in a completely non-clever way (the original F*** Quest being a perfect example). That's not to say I see absolutely no use for such "puzzles", but I don't want that to be the whole game, so I'm holding myself to think of better stuff. But I also don't want things to be too hard, or people will just give up and not finish the game.

So, tying this back to my current status update, there's some action that Jennifer needs to perform during the game where she's going to have to prepare for it ahead of time (by the way, let me say now, I'm going to try to avoid anything but the most minor spoilers in these journals). Much of the past few days has been spent thinking of how much of this the player can reasonably be expected to accomplish (vs. what should be automated as part of the story), what sorts of items the player will need, and how the player will obtain them.

I'm talking about specifics here, not general stuff. I've known for a long time that this scene was going to be in the game, but how to make it work I had to sit down and think about. Pretty soon, I'll be ready to fire WinAGI up again and start doing some more coding.

This one felt a bit rambly (I don't care if that's a word or not), but in another entry I'll post on another day, I'm going to describe my current development strategy, which I think is working pretty well for me, in case anyone might find it useful in their own development efforts.