How do you keep yourself focused when writing a game?

[HanonO (Hanon Ondricek)]

@mathbrush

It helps me to make a “complete” skeleton of a game that can be played but is missing most descriptions and puzzles.

This. Knowing where you’re trying to end up makes it easier to finish things than if you don’t have a goal. Subgoals also help: swimming across a lake is hard; swimming to the first buoy and then the second buoy along the way keeps you from wearing out.

[severedhand]

@aschultz

Come to think of it, sometimes I get really lazy and use qq since there is almost no cause to 2 q’s together even as a silly variable name.

I use TODO as my REPLACE_ME, and a swear word as an anchor/blocker. TODOs are usually in comments or prose so they don’t stop the game compiling, but the swear word stops everything. I generally only have 1-3 of it around at a time at max.

I might try replacing the swear word with qq.

-Wade

[kamineko (Drew Cook)]

I use “Zork”