3039522605_72b86b1e2e[1]Depending on how things go, this might be my final pre-submission update.  I’m up to Beta Release 7 at this point — my testers have been finding bugs at a truly staggering rate, which is testament both to their persistence and my questionable implementation decisions.

Beyond bugs, the testers also identified a lot of areas where the flow of the game was bad, or where I was dumping an unreasonably large amount of text onto the user at once.  Also, several of the testers are completely new to IF, so reading their transcripts is really helping me to identify alternate command formulations that I should support, as well as extraneous wacky actions, synonyms, and the like.  One tester in particular has been excellent at triggering almost every conceivable state machine misfire, and thanks to his work the game is much more solid and stable now.

The testers seem to enjoy the plot and writing so far, although not all have made it past The Big Puzzle yet, so we’ll see when they get to the end.  I’m definitely paying the price for some of my ignorance of the proper way of doing things in the early days.  I made some mistakes early on that are not feasible to fix at this point, and that cause some really wacky behavior.  Next time around I will definitely have a much better idea of what things are fairly straightforward to implement and which are error-prone.

I’m also disappointed (as I suspect almost everyone is at one time or another) with how conversation works in my game.  I use the standard “ASK X ABOUT Y” syntax, which is fine as far as it goes, but feels limiting even as it fails to provide any sort of ongoing conversational flow.  The next time I need to implement NPC conversation, I’m definitely reading Emily Short and Mike Roberts before starting.

The competition starts in just over one week, so I will likely be uploading my submission before Wednesday of next week.  What that means is that the next update will probably be a quick post-submission report before the comp kicks in, after which I will have to maintain radio silence as per Rule 5 until the judging period is over, which will be November 15th.  To fill the time, I should have a new son in the next week or so, so I don’t think it will be a tremendous hardship to wait.

Wish me luck!