I think it was last September that I shelved that programming mechanic from my game and started to focus on the simple mechanics and to get an actual simple game working.
The navigation feature is done, and only thing that there is to do regarding it, is some graphical polish and bug fixing when we run into more bugs. The navigation offers you quite amount of action, but you can always run into the issue where it would be better with some rich features. But for those special cases it is better to embed those features into surrounding mechanics that might need them instead of cluttering them into something that only needs the base core set. Hauling around a lot of baggage is not fun.
When thinking about a lot of this stuff, reflecting on how large game studios galvanise procedures and protocols as the breading bone of results I start to think about what I want to do and how. I like programming, and I like complicated programming puzzles. Some features are very hard to implement, and the review cycle can be draw a lot of energy from you. But most of the features I have built, software or libraries have gone through many iterations to see how it can be made to work properly. In software engineering it is called re-factoring.
I am toying with my previous programming mechanic and thinking about the possibility of having it work in the game, but have it play a back seat and only in special cases where you are fighting bosses(end of levels), opening locked doors and something like that. Just like I am toning down all the navigation mechanic so that I can make and interesting game out of it, also tone down the feature that it is connected with so that it is manageable and can be made interesting.
This has nothing to do with salvaging some work. It has to do with making interesting things out of what I enjoy doing.
But lets see where it fits. I have still to work over the weekend with my brother making actual puzzles and to make the current mechanics fun. And I bet that we will run into some issues with the puzzle creation and solving them, because some minor item might be missing.
I have already seen a couple of problems, but we will just have to solve those like all the rest.
More of this hardship tomorrow morning!!
Ta ta.
V 