Checking it twice*

I worked more on the Big Fucking List™ of all tasks today.  It's complete enough to call finished, but World Famous Game Designer specifically instructed me to complete the list, so that's what I'm gonna do before I publish it and move on to the next task.

WFGD wants me to try working in a different way in the future.  His idea is that, while I'm working on things like game mechanic design or writing sex scene prototypes, the rest of the team (and those in the community who want to contribute) can work on other content that could be released in the meantime.

As a test of this concept, we looked at something minor, which has been stuck on the to-do list for months: the In This Year paragraph that appears at the top of some Lifepath pages:

The idea of this passage is to give you a little bit of flavour about what's happening in the world, and the agent's home country, at each stage of her life.  However – only a couple of these are actually written.  Most Lifepath pages just spawn with an empty In This Year paragraph.

We've been meaning to fill these in forever, but never got round to tackling them.  The reason is that there's no easy way for anybody who isn't me to add the content.  Dissonant Soundtrack wrote up a bunch of them months ago, but nobody was exactly sure how to add them into the game, so they just sat around backstage.

Inspired by WFGD's advice, this weekend Hyneman designed a mini CMS that enables writers to add the In This Year events to a spreadsheet, which is structured in a way that allows Hyneman to upload them into the game himself.

I can get involved with writing or editing these if I want to, but if I don't – anybody in the team can write them, and Hyneman can add them into the game.

In This Year is just a little thing, but it's a little thing that has been stuck in the pipe for months and months.  If this test works, we could repeat it for more content areas (e.g. hometowns, the military brat background, upheavals, and moar Kink Vignettes).

In order to do this, I need to become more organised, and the Big Fucking List™ is the foundation of that.  I'll aim to finish it on the next dev day.

That would normally be tomorrow, but I have to head back into my real job and do a handover day with my replacement there.  So the next dev day will be Tuesday.  I'll see you then! 

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* Joke stolen from Heresiarch