Persistence of time
Added 2020-08-06 17:31:24 +0000 UTCI'd planned to finish up on my design tasks from yesterday, but I spent most of today in talks with various team members on various technical issues.
We made some tech decisions on the avatar, and had productive discussions on some unrelated tech stuff (code & UI). No announcements today, but more info soon.
Game clock RIP
As part of our drive to simplify the writing & coding, we've decided to get rid of the game clock.
Keeping an exact track of the time and date has a pleasingly serious military feel.
But it creates problems:
- Tracking how many minutes have passed in every single passage is tedious for writers
- It adds complexity to the code (e.g. we had to fix lots of bugs related to nightclub closing times)
- It imposes a certain pacing mindset on the writer (this writer, anyway) – if the code forces you to account for every single minute, you can end up writing scenes thinking about what happens in the next minute not what happens next in the story.
It was a nice idea, but it doesn't really add much to the player experience in practice, and maintaining it slows down writing and coding.
So we've decided to get rid, and let writers incorporate precise timings when they're relevant to what the heroine is doing.
The downside of me taking team comms seriously today is that I didn't finish my personal design tasks from yesterday. 🙁 But a key part of the MFAGA plan requires me to balance project admin with my own tasks, so I hope you feel this was broadly the right call.
Okay, that's it for today! Next update tomorrow, see you then!
