I did a quick update where I added some extra information to the side bar. It now tells you how many ‘points’ you are gaining in the current section of the game and also tells you what major event you had in the prior section. This is to make it easier to know what the choices are doing.
So I got the final beta version of the game up! I am still polishing it up but I am hoping for feedback. There is a discussion on the tfgamesite where the contest is taking place.
You can play the game here!
I should have the game mostly ready tonight but I was thinking since Sunday is usually a good working day for me, I will work a bit more on it tomorrow then put out the update tomorrow night. That way that Sunday wont go to waste.
Since I will be trying to get feedback after that, I probably wont be doing much work on the game until I get the feedback, and if I put the game out today, there probably wont be much feedback by tomorrow.
I was checking the contests games on the tfgamesite. There seems to be a few of them for the contest but not a ton of them. Some might be waiting until the last moment, and some might not get finished(I recall that happening with a few each time).
So I was doing a lot of spellchecking and stuff today, and it was really boring and tedious. I have a ton I need to go through too. So I decided, I will just do a little each day until I finish the game. The minor errors here and there don’t really effect game play, so it shouldn’t matter if I do the testing and feedback part of working on the game while also going through the spellchecking and grammar stuff. As long as I do just a bit reach day, then it will get done and I wont go crazy from going over the entire thing looking for typos.
I feel my motivation is slipping a little this week. Probably a combination that I got a lot of work, but also it feels like I got a lot of time to do it. Which you always want to feel like you are running out of time if you want to fight procrastination! Then just having a lot/hard work, makes you subconsciously not want to work too. It would be nice if we can get to the point where we all become robots and you can just modify your own subconscious so it doesn’t’ fight you on stuff. Sadly that is a long ways off.
I am glad I didn’t wait until the very last moment to be working on my game. Still trying to get everything finished done by this weekend, even if it seems like a lot still. In the worst case though, if I go a little over I still have two full weeks to do testing and tweaking of things. I am not feeling confident to get it done by this weekend since there is still a lot but I am very confident if I go over, it shouldn’t be more than a few days, so still plenty of time for testing and what not after.
I got things pretty organized for the contest game now, so I just need to write out all the different scenes. I made good progress today, but it still seems like there is a lot left to write. Though I am hoping having all those different endings will help give me the edge in the contest. Normally games don’t have that many endings, outside of games with bad endings, where the game ends early because you lose.
Usually Monday and Tuesdays are bit of slows days for me, but I want to try to get a lot of work tomorrow and the next day. Still have a bit of work to do but I really want to try to get everything finished up with the contest game this week, so that I have some time to do testing and get feedback.
So I been thinking about writing in general lately, and writing a book specifically. Part of that is because November is national novel writing month and that is coming up. I feel like in some ways doing other writing can be distracting, because it is time I could use working on games but also I feel it is productive in improving my overall writing skill. Also, even if I want to spend all day working on my games, some times I can’t and working on other stuff is helpful. Some times it can even be motivating and then gets me working on the games more.
Some times the distractions I get are real life stuff and family things and in those cases there is less time but often times when I don’t get much done it is just because I feel frazzled and lack focus. So some times taking a break and writing something else helps with those times, where the problem isn’t the amount of time but lack of focus. Since it is still writing, it keeps me in the mindset of writing, so I don’t just go off and play games and then nothing productive happens at all.