And at last, NaNoWriMo is complete! And we are not prepared…

Well, I wasn’t at least, I hope things went a smidge better for everyone else! 😁

Even counting the code, this year I didn’t get very far along the 50k slope. But what I do have is a working game that allows you to wander around and do things. So, win!

The Code

I have a finished copy of the frontend and backend up on my GitHub and have started a free tier Jira account so I can play around with Kanban boards. As I find bugs or need new functionality as I work on the story, I’m going to start opening tickets.

Once I have the GM UI written, I will probably open it up so that anyone can use the code. It was meant as a learning experience, not as a salable product. I plan on selling the stories (maybe), not the code.

I spent a lot more time working on the code and related research during NaNo than I had expected too. I do like the idea of writing games for these events, so I will probably try again for the next Camp now that the game engine is written.

The Story

I have the basic premise of the story and some of the key moments, but there’s a lot left that needs to be fleshed out. I’ve figured out what I want the end win-actions to be and now I’m working backward from that. Which is a lot easier than the other way– wish I’d known that going in! 😅

I have a lot of ‘random’ rooms/areas that I came up with during the word sprints that I need to evaluate if I’m keeping. Rough drafts always end up with some trimming, but I did have some fun ideas.

For the moment I’m pausing to work out a proper map and general idea of the existing hints and how everything connects…

Editing Adventures!

One of the things I figured out really quickly when trying to flesh out the rooms for the story was that I needed a map!

While it’s something I am hoping to have done in the GM UI later, I ended up using Google Draw to create a temporary flowchart. (It’s only half done so there are a lot of rooms missing and most likely things will change. Am blurring it anyway. 🤣)

As you can see not all of the ways that lead in are the ones folks take out again and it’s not as linear as you might expect in places. I’m trying to have folks navigate using landmarks instead of just the normal ‘north-south-east-west’.

The green boxes are self-contained areas, I have a bunch of these that don’t connect to anything that I need to weave in…

Tomorrow’s To-do List

• Keep writing!
• Work on updating the map and fixing missing connection actions
• Start working on the GM UI since it will make it a lot easier to edit the existing rooms and actions (when the time comes)
• Log any new bugs or enhancement into Jira

Onwards! 😁