Quick development update: day 3 is almost finishable now. Although it's definitely a skeleton of what it needs to be in the final product, forward progress is being made.

Getting day 3 finishable has been a little bumpier than I had anticipated, partly because I was focusing for a while on making the wrong parts of it interactive. I've had to take a step back away from the code and put some pen and paper to the task. The result, I think, will be a much more enjoyable one than what I was originally throwing around in my head.

I was not focusing exclusively on the wrong part, mind you, but there is a portion of what happens on day 3 that I was going to make interactive somehow that I've realized just will not work well as an interactive puzzle. At least not within the limits of AGI. Instead, I decided to focus exclusively on making the other parts of the sequence interactive, and things have largely been falling into place.

Another slight hold up has been that I've known the events of day 3 were going to happen for a long time, but I wasn't quite clear how they were going to play out. Now that I'm at the point where I'm trying to get some code going on this, I've put a lot more thought into it, and again a lot of pieces sort of just fell into place. I'm not going to go into spoilerish details, but over the past few days – despite not doing a huge amount of coding work – I've resolved one of the most nagging problems with one character in particular.

I know I said in my last entry that I had the story under control, and now I'm talking about tying up a major story loose-end. Well, they're both true. The fact is that I was just going to drop the story thread I'm talking about. That was never a decision I was terribly happy about it, but I saw it as necessary. Now that I've got a clearer idea how this day 3 stuff is going to play out, everything makes more sense.

So, yeah, even though I've got a handle on the story, that doesn't mean that puzzle development isn't going to continue shaping it a little bit.