All Characters defined!

I've just completed my first draft of what I'm calling the 'non-interference path'. This is the path that all of the NPCs take if the player does nothing throughout the game, enabling me to then work out the logic for the implications of player choices. Doing this has forced me to define every character in the game, so even though I've only done the first draft, I'm fairly confident now of exactly who the protagonists/antagonists are.

The next step is to work out all of the necessary locations in the game. The non-interference path has given me a lot of those, but I need to start thinking about the other end-scenarios (ie. end goals that do not involve the player being the winner of the competition) and exactly how the player can make those happen. Then it'll be the first draft of the timeline followed finally by the first draft of the map. At that point I can start the second iteration of the process!

Lots more planning to do, but I feel that I've made a reasonable step forward today.

A new beginning

There was a fair amount of work done on this game after the demo release, but ultimately this project suffered from the same fate as most of its amatuar kind: over ambition and a lack of clear direction. I had a lot of ideas for scenes and characters but I struggled to form them into anything solid, and when the larger questions needed to be asked (like should the NPCs be static or move around) I had no answers. My hope of developing-on-the-go was firmly dashed. When I started to truely see the enormity of my plans I was overwhelmed. Suddenly the project wasn't fun, it was work, so I parked it for a while hoping that it would sort itself out in the back of my mind.

That was a couple of years ago. Recently, more out of curiosity than intent, I decided to look through the archived project to see where I had actually gotten to. The prologue content was highly disappointing, but the parts from the demo still looked solid to me and I started to feel excited by this game again. With that excitement came a great deal of concern though. I was worried that if I did decide to continue this project that I would have to restart from scratch, but when I opened the RAGs designer I discovered that the core engine was solid and the logic I had developed was easy to follow. The vast majority of the coding was built from a central group of components, making it very easy to develop further, so I set about stripping away all of the poorly planned stuff. What I was left with filled me with that initial excitement I felt for this project a couple of years ago.

Before anyone gets too excited, I want to make it clear that this project is not back under development yet. I do not wish to repeat my mistakes, so this time I am planning the game first in full detail before I do any more work in RAGs. I have ditched a lot of the original ideas* but I am still left with a complicated, ambitious structure for the game. If it becomes apparent in the planning stages that my idea is simply not feasible at all, then I will declare this project dead once and for all. Until then I will try to at least post small updates on how that process is going.

*There was going to be a lot of supernatural stuff in the game coming from biological and electronic technology left behind by the military to satisfy some of my other kinks.