March 2022 - Week 132 - Moody

Summary

• Irritable
• Project Management with JIRA
• Mood affecting conversations
• Bad News

Detail

On Saturday and Sunday I continue with Behaviours affecting mood, adding story events when they start and finish and the intensity of the effects scaled by Need extremity.

I could be using JIRA better. While planning it was useful to organise features with subtasks. While implementing, I find subtasks in features planned for next week are better suited to being implemented now, but it's a fiddle to move subtasks. Part of me thinks a matrix of task relationships would be useful; a hierarchical view for planning and a chronological view for implementation. Another part of me thinks this might just be confusing and too much overhead.

Monday through Thursday is more work on Behaviours. Adding statements to conversations, affecting the probability of statements being made, the effects on speakers (catharsis) and listeners. These effects are largely hidden from the user which is counter to most game design thinking.

I've been watching a live playthrough of Bad News from the 2016 Roguelike Celebration playlist. Bad News is an intersection of improvised acting, procedural generation and role-playing games. A town is generated and a member of the public plays as a mortician's assistant whose job is to find and deliver the news of someone's death to their next of kin. The game is run by a 'wizard' who responds to the player's actions and feeds relevant information to an 'actor' who plays all the characters in the town.

On Friday I'm in Levels café and write a set of tests to ensure that Behaviours loaded from file don't crash regardless of parts missing. I'm mostly finished Behaviours and make a start on Rooms, having a good think about the best way to implement them.

For the next week I have some UI work to finish on Behaviours and the rest of the week will be spent on Rooms. If all goes well Dwergs will be sleeping in their own bedrooms by the end of the week.