Extra Work!

First things first, sorry for those of you who hang out on Discord, I haven't been very active there the last day or two, and likely the next couple days as well. I need to focus a bit more in order to get everything I'd like done for the release. As usual, I'm trying to go beyond what I promise, and I'd like to keep that up. :)

As I told you all in my developer promise, I want to be transparent and own up to any of my mistakes. My plan for section of the framework I'm working on right now was to leave out a lot of the detailed code for game mechanics, instead leaving open hooks to fill in later on. Unfortunately, while reasonable on paper, it hasn't been as feasible in reality. Basically, I underestimated the amount of work that would be needed up front, or overestimated what could be done later. 

This isn't a huge deal, but it has meant a little slower-going, and more work for the release. An example is with the  code to wake up in the morning and properly route you off to work after getting ready. It was planned to add the possibility of sleeping in, calling in sick, taking vacation days, and the the resulting interactions with your job, later on. However, because of my approach of trying to make all the systems as seamless as possible (so the player just sees something quick and natural) made leaving these out now difficult. I would have to write a bunch of placeholder code (in other places too) that would basically be thrown away later. I don't like wasting effort that way, so I've been going with coding those items as much as necessary to keep going as planned.

This is basically a result of figuring out how the finished system would work, and the time needed to code it, without considering the need for incremental releases that function as expected. Food for thought in the future, to be sure.

I'm not expecting to be late. I just need to push even harder, and avoid some fun distractions (like discord) a bit to make it happen. 

The image above is a WIP of Appletree's downtown area. It's dominated by the large central park and town hall building. The squares are all city blocks. I'm still deciding how I want to handle this image, as far as the click map goes, but it's finished enough to work for that purpose. It's kinda ugly right now, with no differentiation or detail for the blocks, but it'll be easy to update the image as it gets attention.

That's all for now, back to work for me!