On priorities and schedules

I’ve got many projects to juggle currently. Well, I *always* have way too many projects at any time, I’m not talking about that. I have currently the time to actually work on my projects, and I have decided to do more than one at once, switching from one to the other as inspiration, energy, and outside interest change. This offers me some insight into how and why I prioritize things, very interesting.

Currently, I’ve switched my main focus back to Next Stop: Nowhere! (which means, away from TRS), as I’d like to finish it, for several reasons. First, it has received a huge amount of work, blood and sweat, one might say, and I wouldn’t want to see this totally wasted. Then, it’s my first attempt at a released XBLIG, and I’d really want to see it there, on the XBox Live Marketplace, even if it completely tanks, with 3 sales all told, all of them from my friends. And next, it’s not that far away from being ready. It won’t *ever* be complete, because that kind of game can never be really finished, there is always more content and more polish to add, but it can get to a state where I’m proud to show it to the world, and not ashamed by low production values. Finally, the deciding point is: if I finish this one, it’ll be a huge weight off me, one less project to think about, one less huge task list to clear.

Now, why am I posting this here, instead of there? Well, TRS is a ‘published’ project, so there are some people who know about it, who can already play with it, maybe have fun with it, NSN is not. That means here, some people might be waiting for the next version, hoping for new features and content. So I’ve come here, to let these people know that the next version is probably not going to make it for the month of May. I can’t promise anything really, but I’ll really try to make one before the summer comes, that’s a month from now.

Working on new features, savegame?

I’ve made some good progress after recovering from my PC crash. I’m working toward the support of savegame, something long overdue. Most of the structure is in place, but there’s still lots of coding to do.

First things first, I had to clean up some of the mess I made when hacking a main menu in, and reduce the big heap of code that was all piled up in one giant class (called Game, as you’d guess). That wasn’t in the least FUN to do, it still feels nice to have a cleaner base to build on.

I hope this time I will be able to add the savegame support to the next build, it was planned for inclusion several releases ago, but didn’t make it, as it proved too much work for my limited time.

If I don’t find the energy/continued free time to do this proper, I will concentrate on other features, like providing more buildings, and making them useful. I have some new sprites that were sent to me a while ago, it would be nice to see some more diversity. There are lots of possibilities, I’d love to hear from the regulars from the (RIP) forum, and the (maybe) new ones both, please tell me in comments what you’d like to see in next version(s).

PC crash but no loss

I’ve had a big panic moment yersterday as I was working on TRS.

There was a TRS window that didn’t want to close (I was debugging using VC++). Tried killing processes, no change. So I ask for reboot. Most programs exit cleanly, but this window stays, blocking the reboot. After some time, I turn off the PC using the power button.

And… Windows is broken. Cannot boot. While in the loading sequence, a furtive BSOD, then reboot, in a loop.

A couple hours later, including breathing breaks, my floppy drive re-installed, my Windows XP CD located, I managed to boot a rescue console, and a chkdsk fixed it. I guess a critical system file was damaged by my forced stop.

So, the time I was supposed to use on TRS was mostly lost on successive panic and system fixing attempts. I will work on it again today, as much as possible, but that might not be much.