The Quern

I’m hitting my stride now.  I’m now finished with Scene 4 and almost all the hard stuff in Scene 5 is done (implementing linear algebra in Inform 7 is only hard with the right extensions — without them I shudder to think what it would be like).  I just need to put the finishing touches on the ignition puzzle and it’s on to the climactic Scene 6.

Of course, I’m running out of time as well.  It’s now September.  I’d hoped to be done with implementation by now and have time for three or so testing iterations and to punch up the writing a bit.  I’m still going to make a writing-improvement pass (and probably redo much of Scene 1, which seems hopelessly crude from where I’m at now), but I think at this point I’m only going to have time for one full testing cycle, maybe two if I’m lucky and fast.

What that means is that I have very little margin for error.  My code had better be pretty solid to start with, because if the beta testers don’t find the bugs on their initial run-through the chances are good it will still be in there at release.

Pretty soon I’m going to have to familiarize myself with the full suite of testing and debugging tools in the Inform 7 UI.  I’ve been using the Skein regularly — it’s a great way to speed through the game up to a certain point so you can test new implementation, and it also ensures you have a through-line that actually works and is repeatable.  But I’m not nearly as familiar with the Index pages, the Transcript window, and the release process, so I’ll once again be spending time with the documentation so I don’t get hung up right at the last minute.

I’ve written a lot of fun, fun linear algebra code in the past week that I’ll share in a post-mortem after the competition is done.  For now, just let me say that I’m extremely impressed with the tools Inform 7 has for expressing powerful programming concepts in a very readable way.  Graham Nelson deserves major kudos for Inform 7′s design and features, and the seamless support for extensibility.  As I mentioned above, the proper extensions were key to allowing me to easily write the code I needed, and they were very easy to include and use.  Even better, extension documentation also just snaps right in to the normal documentation structure in the IDE.  Very, very impressive.