Much of this week was spent transplanting the planning for node actions from text to the format that our graphical editor works with. Not a difficult task. From there I’ve begun to put meat on those bones, make the data mean something. But nothing is all that functional just yet.

We seem to have inadvertently fallen into themes for each year of working on this. The first year was thematically, “to get all of the basic systems working together”. The second year (this year) has been thematically, “to make the game good”. The third year will likely look like, “to finish the game, and to try to sell it”.

We’ve been holding off on any publicity for a number of reasons. The game just isn’t there visually, there’s still all kinds of temporary art floating around. Significant portions of it still don’t even have mock ups. Much fun as it is to blame Sew’s limited available time, another factor is our slightly excessive perfectionism. We’re on, what, the fifth version of the walking sprites? It might all pay off in the end. It might be irrelevant.

The other factor is that the game itself hasn’t all been there. Even now I’m still making fundamental changes to how it all works. We’ve had a rough draft for awhile now, but it isn’t good enough. The harsh realities of game overpopulation is that the scant few players you can get to try it the first time need to be blown away by the first few minutes of the game if you want any hope of them spreading the word. Marketing and game quality are a balance: the weaker one is, the more the other has to compensate.

So those are our goals for this year: to get it all together enough to start the Sisyphean journey that is marketing. To have enough art done that it doesn’t look incompetent. To have the game concrete enough that you can tell someone what it’s about in confidence that it won’t change the next day.