Sunday, July 19, 2009

A Week?

It's been a week since I last posted an entry? Wow, time flies when you're behind the 8-ball. *sigh* It's been a rough week, but productive. Just not finding completion. The light is getting brighter, but I'm still surrounded by darkness. I have a deadline to get something out the door by Tuesday night. I hope that I can get questing done and perhaps get a stab at leveling by then. I believe that questing is close, but I haven't been able to finish it off yet. It's once again the integration with the iPhone code that's going awry. Plus I keep finding that I need to go back and re-factor a little more than I expected. It's good, in its way, but it's slowing progress.
One the alpha front, I do have several people signed up for testing. It's going to look reasonable for an alpha 1. There are obviously a lot more I want to do, but for an alpha it's a start. I do have several backgrounds in. Not exactly what I wanted stylistically, but they'll work as placeholders. I'm trying to write generic code since I expect to re-use some of it for a future endeavor, but that's also slowing progress. I know that one of the tenets of agile development is not to over-engineer things, but I find that it's not so much over-engineering as planning for the future development of the project. Since I know what still needs to be done and know that the game won't be released without those features, it makes it more of a necessity than one would normally expect.
Otherwise, things are progressing well but slowly. Inventory had a few gaps I needed to patch up before I could move on. I'd really hoped to have had more done (like the whole thing) by now, especially since Harry Potter 6 is out in the theatre (saw it last night). Still, if I can get something working in the not-too-distant future people may still be interested enough. And when the DVD comes out for Christmas (as is likely) I'll be well-positioned there, I hope.
That's the short of it. Questing is coming together and hopefully will be done soon. Then leveling. And then it's on to bigger, better things. And a LOT of testing. :)