I did a postmortem on my first game, which goes into a lot of detail on the process – similarly, I’m a non-programmer with a tiny bit of long-ago coding-type experience who made an Inform 7 game.
Some high points that are potentially interesting to share:
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My game started with a three-act structure, and ending with a three-and-two-halves-act structure. I had an overall sense of where the story would go, but more or less moved through each act linearly in a design-implement-polish cycle. In the implementation phase, I also moved pretty freely between writing and coding. This wound up being pretty motivating, since whenever I was feeling bored with doing structural programming, it was pretty easy to switch gears and write some jokes or punch up the prose, and I was able to alternate in-the-weeds debugging with big picture tasks like thinking up puzzles. For my second game, I took the approach recommended by Emily Short and others of implementing a minimal version of the structure and then doing more writing, polish, etc., which I found much more of a slog, FWIW.
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I also sorta had each act focus on a different part of Inform in order to teach myself the relevant skills: Act I was meat-and-potatoes stuff; Act II was more timing and condition-based puzzles; Act III was scenes and alternate solutions; then the finale was kinds (and I guess the help menu taught me tables, sorta). This wasn’t systematic – I didn’t have a part that taught me relations, and in fact I still don’t really understand or use them, for example – so I don’t think it went too overboard in a way that a player would notice, except that the first act has a dumb rope puzzle that’s really just there since I wanted to tech myself how ropes work.
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I was able to get a beta version done in mid-August, which gave me a good amount of time to find testers and implement their feedback (hi @rabbit!) Everyone always says this is the most important thing for authors, especially parser authors, especially especially first-time parser authors to do; they are right.
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I found Inform not that hard to get a handle on? In the first act I definitely did more copy-and-pasting of code I didn’t understand and implementing hacky workarounds without knowing what I was doing, but for most of the rest of the game I did a better job of digging into the documentation, trying to actually grok the principles, and coming to the forum with questions, which was a much better way of doing things (then I decided to center the finale puzzle on fiddling with multiple interchangeable copies of a kind, which is tricky to do and led to more hackery). Of course, this meant that some dumb decisions I’d made in the beginning forced me into even more, even dumber workarounds later on, since I was too lazy to do a total rewrite of problem children like the dialogue system. I’d have probably been better off having my first game be shorter, so I could have left these growing pains behind more quickly and embark on a more robust second game as a more experienced author – but this was the game I was excited to write so I can’t regret this too much!
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Releasing my first game in IFComp was a little intimidating but lots of fun! There’s great camaraderie among the authors, a fun authors-only forum, and there’s just a lot of energy and excitement. Spring Thing (and now ParserComp) are really cool too, don’t get me wrong, but I think they’re lower-key. I can see different folks seeing the latter as a selling point and better way to dip their toes into the water, though (my game also had a somewhat-undeservedly very positive reception, which might be giving my rose-colored glasses about how anxious I was at the outset!)
One last point about this:
Since my first game was puzzle focused, I found I could design it the way I’d prep for a tabletop roleplaying game session – like, I’d jot down notes on locations, bullet points with snatches of dialogue or jokes or evocative phrases to work in, and a rough idea of the challenges and potential solutions. Then implementation was kind of like running the game, where I’d work those details in, improvise alternate solutions or realize what I’d planned on didn’t work, etc. I’m glad I didn’t “overprep” since I think it would have led to wasted effort, since as Amanda says your perspective often shifts once you’re in the weeds and seeing what’s resonating and feeling effective.
Anyway, congrats on your game, I’m looking forward to checking it out once it’s done!