Monday, September 22, 2008

Developer Diaries, episode 25

Milestones mark blog posts and vice versa. Us writers completed the first draft of the game script, clocking it at just under 470 000 words. This means that lately we have had time for feedback, self-reflection, in-depth analysis, consequential writer emo and eventual wishes to scrap half of it and write it again. Anyway, from now on we first fix the stories so that we have a complete story we are happy with and then we fix the language so that it's proper English and technically as sound text as we can do. Then we are done. I've started on my bit and found it immensely hard. The big problems are easy to see and weed out, just scrap the faulty scenes and write something new, but when something only *feels* wrong and I don't know how to fix it, it just stumps me completely. Similarly, when parts of the script feel like they would need *something* more, coming up with that magic ingredient is hard, sometimes even clearly seeing where the faults lie is hard. In the end, this reworking of the script seems to be all about coming up with something I have already said, just in a better or more elegant way.

Writers demolishing their text with chainsaws and axes make the bystanders sick with despair of course. I argued quite heatedly with delta about when I'm happy with the script (it was more about a demo in fact(oh shit the D word)). I don't know really, KS is so gigantic that grasping the script as a whole might not even be possible for me, and thus the question can't even be answered. I guess best answer is "when I'm not unhappy with any part of the script". This, I feel, is a reachable goal because I can easily name the things I'm unhappy with (and I have) and we have discussed about how to fix them or should we even bother.

As a followup on the previous post, chendo of Mirror Moon introduced us to Redmine, a really promising project management application. Apart from the somewhat heavy upkeep it needs and the despair the constantly growing ToDo and Issue lists cause, it's really awesome.

moekki drew me a picture to go with the blog post because DD's are otherwise so boring. Here.