dfabulich
May 16, 2015, 10:31pm
17
cvaneseltine:
This is somewhat tangential to your post, but I like the idea of a WIP folder. I think there would be value in a dedicated area to talk about experiments, give updates on them, and raise excitement for upcoming games.
Well, on the CoG forum it grew organically. There were so many WIP threads getting so many posts that it was obviously necessary. Not so, here, and I still think there are big structural reasons why.
How does one go about centering text on the status line? I’ve looked at the relevant routine for it (can’t remember if it’s Draw- or PrintStatusLine) in HUGOLIB.H but I can’t seem to add anything to it that will automatically put the text in the middle of the status line.
Any advice is appreciated. Thanks!
Competitions. IFComp forbids games that have posted public betas, and Spring Thing forbids games where a public beta has been posted that’s too close to a finished product.
Completeness. That clever rope-and-pulley liquid-transfer puzzle just can’t be enjoyed at all until the world model is basically done and reasonably bug free. Choice-based games can usually be played/enjoyed page by page.
Chapters. (Two sides of the same coin.) WIPs on the CoG forum are usually roughly in the CoG house style: 100,000-word interactive novels, divided into a linear list of chapters, where early chapters affect later chapters via your character’s stats. Thus, it makes perfect sense to exhibit just the first three chapters of your game and ask for feedback, then finish another chapter and ask for more feedback, until you’re done. Two-hour parser-based games usually don’t have chapters that can be delivered in installments.
Puzzle spoilers. There is a huge difference between how you approach a puzzle before and after you know its solution, and a radical difference in the feeling of solving a puzzle and having the solution told to you. IMO, puzzle spoilers are very different from plot spoilers in that regard.