At long last the game is basically how it used to be. Probably a few crashes still lurking in there that I need to sort out. But the conversion is done. There’s a looming technical issue that I’ll need to sort out at a later date, but for the time being I’m switching my gears entirely back to working on the game itself. If I get lucky, enough time will have passed for one of my libraries to fix the issue for me. If I’m not lucky, I’ll have to do something time consuming. But I’ll worry about that when there’s a game worth investing into.

I’m taking a more literal prototype approach to adjusting the game this go around. Instead of planning out and scripting a large chunk of the branching plot, I’m just building a simple prototype that only branches in a few specific ways that represent the different ways the plot can affect the gameplay. It’s much faster to build, and gives a solid idea of how the changes will work out before applying all the detail to it. Doesn’t give much sense of the flavor of the game, but I’m ignoring that for now.

Likewise I’m temporarily going to start making the map layouts by hand instead of with the random generator. For now this is a measure that lets me easily radically alter the structure of the map without rewiring the generator. But it also lets me get a sense of what matters in a map layout and what doesn’t, which will feed back into the generator once I know what to target. It may also turn out that there’s only a handful of set layouts worth having around, so map generation might get dropped entirely.

It’s all about saving time to try things out faster. Hopefully these changes will work out. But if not, it won’t have cost as much as it could have.