All right, so my strategy for getting Chimera Angel finished goes something like this:

• Announce a release target, so that there's some pressure to get the work done besides just "I want to finish it"
• Keep adding what I can to the game, even if it's trivial stuff, just so I'm always doing something on it
• Iterative development

The last one is important, because it's easy to forget about it when making a game, and get focused on making the game be the absolute best that it can be. But here's the thing: demo 1 of my game, crappy as it was, was just a "get it working" implementation. Then demo 2 came along, didn't really add much to the length of the game, but improved the game in just about every way. Since demo 2, that part of the game has seen even more enhancement, but a big block in my progress was knowing that certain sequences would be implemented but not knowing exactly how you would get to those sequences.

The solution is fairly simple, but it took me a while to embrace it whole-heartedly: make it so that these sequences can be reached without entering debug mode, by setting up the flags that would be set in a fully-completed game. If some action is required, don't bother setting up all the little details of these steps right away.

That way, I know that if I want to have a puzzle of some sort for, say, "getting the ball" (not a real Jen's Quest puzzle), but I don't know exactly how that's going to play out just yet, I can put in some scaffolding code that will let me get past that point right now. Why is this important? It lets me get the framework for the entire game from start to finish set up. Then I can go back in and work on improvements until the final product is exactly what I want it to be.

So, with that in mind, I've been setting up development objectives for myself that take the form "make day 1 finishable without entering debug mode". I've got days 1 and 2 finishable without debug mode, so my next objective is day 3 and so on, until the game can be played all the way through without hitting alt-d and working some cheat magic.

What I'm emphasizing here is that days 1 and 2 are not necessarily polished, but they are doable. They keep my forward momentum going, and they keep me from getting stuck on anything, because I can just put in a placeholder for later.

Now, I haven't done any programming work on the game in a few days (though that's not to say I haven't done any WinAGI work) because I've been thinking through what needs to happen on day 3. I've had a sketch in my mind about this, but I needed to flesh it out, and I think I'm at the point now where I can get back to work.

(Minor vent: this blogging interface I'm using is a little retarded. If I dare hit the enter key, it interprets that as me wanting four line breaks between each paragraph. So, I've got to go into manual HTML mode and put it all in P's without hitting enter. Oh well.)