Frayed Knights: Little Victories
I was about thirteen when I got a Commodore 64.

I'd learned to program in BASIC on a Sinclair ZX80 earlier that year. The Sinclair had 1K of memory. Programming games on that thing was nigh unto impossible. A random game of tic-tac-toe was about the extent of its capabilities. Going from that to a whopping 64K of RAM (48K actually usable) was like heaven. Why, with that much memory to play with, I could make ANYTHING!

But there's a difference between having the technical capabilities of making something, and actually knowing how to make it. Naturally, I wanted to make RPGs. Or adventure games. There really wasn't much of a delineation back in those days. But I had no clue how to do it. After searching for inspiration in David Ahl's Basic Computer Games and More Basic Computer Games, I had some idea of how to drive a semi-data-driven interface so I could have a webwork of connected rooms that I could walk through with a text interface of directions like "north," "e," and "up."

I got it working at about 11:00 one night. I was exultant, but I had to refrain from cranking my music up and dancing a victory dance to avoid waking up my parents. They wouldn't understand. It was a Black Triangle moment. Anybody else looking at it would say, "Huh? What's the big deal about that? People have been doing that in adventure games for years."

But for me, personally, it represented a big step. I was able to walk around a virtual 12-room text-based world. I had found "The Way," and it would later provide the foundation for a few adventure-like games I wrote in my spare time (no, none were ever released to the public). I was able to see that.

When programming, there is roughly 10,000+ different ways of doing something. The trick is trying to figure out "the right way." The way that won't disintegrate into an unmaintainable mess when you realize you missed a critical feature and have to shoehorn it in. The way that won't make your life harder as it goes from exercising test data to using real data. The way that will probably STILL get completely overhauled once you've finished it and realize how you could have done it better.

And yet the average person will not appreciate it in the least. For example, doing UI stuff. Which I am STILL working on. For the average player, the amount of work that has to go into making a working drag-and-drop inventory is probably going to be completely lost on them. They just know that it should work.

On the design and coding side, there are a lot of issues to take care of.

Like what happens to the object - logically - when it is picked up from one an inventory and dragged across the screen? Does it remain in the original inventory, but hidden in the interface? Or do I remove it from the original inventory the moment it is picked up, but before the player has chosen what he's going to do with it? What happens if he tries to shut down the inventory screen or bring up the option screen with a keypress while holding an item with the mouse? If I bring up a pop-up screen of the items stats when the player hovers the cursor over an item's icon, should I still do it if he's dragging another item around? Will that be confusing? And what if I don't WANT to move the item, but simply want to activate it?

For what seems like a simple behavior, there are a ton of questions that need answered, code that needs to be written to deal with exceptional cases, and bugs that need fixing. Or I end up walking around with a wand icon stuck on the screen and my fireball wand permanently missing from my inventory, as happened in the picture.

All these elements all have to work together consistently. Otherwise, it feels clumsy to the player. As the first iteration of many UI elements did for a lot of players who tried out the pilot. I can't guarantee this new stuff will be a huge improvement, but it will be an improvement.

It's all boring, black-triangle-y stuff, yet I find myself feeling all excited and exultant when it works. Just as I was when I completed the rudimentary system to walk around a 12-room text-based world when I was thirteen.

But really, I'm just looking forward to it all working perfectly so I can FORGET ABOUT IT and just have it work for me so I can move on to bigger things.

Labels: Frayed Knights, programming

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 1:25 AM (Permalink)