Zarf Updates

Yes, I'm late. Sorry -- it's still the weekend, isn't it?

Six puzzle barriers, and the map traversal code that goes along with them. As I said back in... when was I working on ritual shortcut code? November? Anyway, a lot of this game has turned out to be "Implement a thing! Now implement it again, in the more-convenient shortcut which is available once the player knows how to do it!"

Then, in some cases, you implement it a third and fourth time, for when the player discovers an alternate solution and starts using that.

I am moderately terrified of bugs -- any mismatch in the implementations is going to cause plot holes. In normal programming, you'd have a single implementation underneath and call it from two (or four) places, but sadly that approach doesn't make sense here. So I do acres of testing and sweat a lot.

(The latter only slightly because the temperature in Boston zoomed up to 90 this weekend. Cold front tomorrow, which should help, if the accompanying thunderstorms don't knock over my power.)

I'm afraid I don't have any other exciting news for May. I spent a lot of time on Secret Project STW-5, which is just the coolest thing in the world but not ready for any kind of public display yet. (It is IF of a sort, but not parser-based.) I am hopeful that I can start limited alpha-testing in the next couple of weeks, so I may have more to say about it next month.