Invisible stuff

When I show my game to my chief game tester, my wife, she seems to expect new mechanics and graphics any time or lose interest, which is fine. I is difficult though, because sometimes the biggest leaps do not have anything to do with what the player will experience in the end, or at most very distantly. It's about making sure things can happen before they do.

Yesterday was such a day. It was half past twelve at night and my wife got upstairs from watching The Sinner to notify me that we really do need to go to bed, as I have a job and the alarm will start whining at 6:15. That is life for a game developer that does not (yet) have what it takes to be able to fund it all without a day time job. But what I wanted to say is that damn have I been productive for my standards and damn don't I have anything concrete to show for it.

I was working on a journal class for my player. For now, it should be able to hold a set of quests that the player is associated with and a set of NPC's that that player has interacted with and that think something of the player. There'll be more things in the journal, but I'm not sure what exactly, but probably some sort of log of where the player went, who he met and what he did. I do have in mind that I'm not going to get it as cumbersome as in Morrowind. I know people seem to love it, but I don't and hey, it's my game.

Furthermore, there's not a basis quest system which knows where it is added to the journal and if interaction with an object is needed for that. Then it knows that there is a task to perform, consisting of going to a location and/or getting things (maybe I'll have some kill-the-guy-things as soon if I get to work on combat). Once the quest is completed, there are rewards and specific people think better of you. And if you fail, people think worse.

Next I'll be doing with the journal is have a UI like with the inventory and focus on actually creating quest objects to test if what I did is actually working. If it does, this project is officially a game. Not a very complete game, but a game nonetheless. And I'm actually pretty proud of what I learned in just over 2 months. Is that arrogant?