Game Complete

That was fun. My first* commit was on January 2, my last on the 30th. To my knowledge I worked on it every single day, although my commit timestamps claim otherwise. I know that no day went by that I didn't spend at least some time thinking about the game. I know I have the mental ability to keep that kind of attention up all year, the question is just "how miserable will it make me?" I have to say though, right now I'm feeling pretty good. The last non-work-related programming project I finished was Benkyou Box, a Japanese learning app, now defunct since Heroku eliminated their free tier. That was in April 2022, coming up on three years ago. Finishing stuff is great, and that's the point of this project. Game jams, when attempted solo, make it really easy to quit if one single thing goes wrong, because the sunk cost is low. A yearlong project has the potential to bore me, or scope creep, or meander in a state of almost-not-quite-done-ness, forever. The Fatal Distractions project, I think, strikes a good middle ground, where it won't get boring, and the deadlines are really demanding, but quitting halfway through a month would feel like such a massive failure. And at the end of it, I'll have septupled the number of video games I've completed (or if you count the ones I've worked on in a group, almost tripled it). I think my favorite part of the project at the moment is that I'm finished with text adventures specifically. When I tried this project the first time, back in 2018 I think, I didn't want to make a parser. The second time, in Rust, I couldn't for the life of me figure out how Bevy was meant to work for a text adventure. Here and now in 2025, raylib and C is exactly what I needed: I get to play around with strings, which C is bad at but makes extremely fun, and raylib is exactly what I want in an engine. These, plus the realization that I don't code anything anymore, was enough to motivate me to stick with it and finish the game.

I leaned, I think, a bit too hard in the "don't hardcode anything" direction for this project. The only actions are moving, incrementing and decrementing counters, looking at the current room, and taking / dropping items. The only predicates are "are you in this room", "do you have this item", "is this item here", and "is this counter above 0?". Everything else has to be handled manually (attacking, inserting keys, opening doors). I don't know yet how I would have made that work differently. I'm very happy with breaking everything up into actions, words, items, rooms, and "room_ins", which are the room's descriptions depending on the predicates. The priority system I think worked great, it really let me simplify action-choosing logic, but maybe I could have made it smarter.

The adventure itself isn't tremendously interesting, but I was really running out of time so I knew I had to come up with something. Intro area, solve a puzzle with the provided mechanics, now you can leave, build up a little list of "places to return to", find challenges, overcome them, eventually win. And for anyone who thinks my game is poorly conveyed (me), I put in a walkthrough. I'm happy I put it in the Thrive universe; that original game was about 1% execution, 99% squandered potential. The balance is a little more favorable in this case, I think. Expect to see more games in this universe in the future.

I don't even want to talk about the art. I'm supremely out of practice, and the title screen is a pile of ropes on a trash heap. I will never not be astounded with how hard it is to turn a vision in your mind's eye into a rendered image. Appreciate artists.

Next game, I'm not going in order. Going in order would result in me having to do the 3D game in December, when I'll be Christmas shopping and Christmas hosting, and Going to Mexico, and just fucking relaxing after a year of working, making games, learning Japanese, spending more time with friends, and knitting. December will probably be the "'Noids" chapter, which is Arkanoid, which is Breakout, which I could program in 45 minutes. Freed from the expectation of going chapter-by-chapter, next up is "Strategy", in which I will program the card game Hachi Hachi, and if I get time, Koi-Koi as well. I'll get to make art, I'll get to write music, I'll get to rig up a deck of cards and dealing and hands and melds and the whole thing.

I want to come back and re-analyze this game, I guess next January when I'm done with the project. I'm happy with what I did and proud of the product I put out, but it would not amaze me if this is the worst game in the project. Onwards and upwards I suppose!

 - Bill

* Okay, no, I wrote a little bit of text display code half a year ago, all of which is reused and basically untouched in this project, but it wasn't part of the same effort I guess.