Zarf Updates

I suppose you want the room count, don't you. I will give it to you. When? Now, I should think. You look forward to it, do you? I think you do. ...Nine rooms, I got done this month. All clues, all descriptions, all scenery, all actions handled. I can play through those nine rooms and it is a solid, playable IF game.

This is most of what I call "chapter 0" in my notes. After another couple of puzzles, the player transitions to "chapter 1". That's where most of the game opens up, at least a little bit.

But how many rooms are there in this game? I hear you cry. Okay, that's a fair question. There are 82. So you might conclude that I am 11% done with this thing and have eight months of work remaining. And that's... not a completely terrible estimate.

I don't mean that it's my estimate. Or that it's accurate. Rather, I guess, that the possible errors fall in both directions. So I can't say it's definitely too long or too short.


Not all rooms are created equal. Laboratories and storage rooms are packed with exciting objects. Hallways are fairly boring. (They have just a couple of exciting objects that I moved from the storage rooms to even things out.) Maybe 25% of the rooms are hallway. They go by quickly.

Some of this month was spent constructing scenery classes which I will reuse throughout the game. That will save time later. On the other hand, I didn't have a chance to start the tutorial, which will run throughout the actions in the first room and then mostly drop out. A tutorial is hard work and may chew up a couple of weeks of March on its own.

I still haven't tackled the "monocle" plan (changing how some bits of paper are presented), nor one of the environmental spell components. (Neither appears until "chapter 1".) There's some planning to do there.

Some of this month was spent profiling the HL code, just to see if there were any horrible inefficiencies. Of course, there were. So I dug into a little low-level hackwork to speed up certain I7 activities. I will have to do more of this in the future.

So I add all those factors up and shrug. I got a lot of implementation done in February. It was a good month.

What else happened in February? I worked some on Project Edifice Gumshoe. I got as far as an iPad prototype, I showed it to people... total flop. The puzzle mechanic is simply opaque to players. Yay prototyping! I have some ideas for starting over. Boo starting over! Depressing even when it's necessary. But the code from the prototype will be recycled into something. I got clever with iOS animation transitions, and the result is very tactile.

I helped out with an effort to update the Z-machine specification documents. This is not strictly in my wheelhouse -- Hadean Lands runs on Glulx, my successor to the Z-machine. But David Fillmore decided to clean up a bunch of unfinished editing and error-correction from the old days... by which I mean 1997... and that turned into a bunch of online discussion. Plus I have the keys to the web site. So I put in some time on that.

There was also a proposal about adding text captions to IF cover art, and in general to images in IF data files. (For accessibility, like alt tags on web images.) This is in my wheelhouse; I proposed the IF data file spec so I get to organize updates to it. Then we looked at the IF Babel site (covering bibliographic information, including cover art) and realized that nobody was in charge of it; it's just been sitting untouched on the Archive since 2006. So I cranked up a mailing list and got that side moving. (The Blorb side is awaiting comment; I'll add it to the site next week.)

And today I dug into a completely tedious idea about adding more boolean flags to the Inform 6 object structure... which I thought I implemented in '98... but it turned out I forgot. Result: a completely tedious patch to the I6 compiler, which works great. (Unit test!) Only my clever optimization idea of '06 didn't take this into account, so it breaks when you run it. I'll have to update the Glulx spec too.

Will Hadean Lands benefit from more boolean flags? Probably not! Because even if I get the interpreter fixed, I7 doesn't know to take advantage of it! Yes, IF is still software engineering: messy. But I move my parts forward one step at a time.

And I played the new RealMyst update, and some of the Dishonored DLC from last year. Gotta finish that this weekend.