Devlog Nine

Playtesting

The game has undergone some playtesting in the last 24 hours - most of the changed fixed were small balancing tweaks to make more options viable. For example, the price of good food of reduced, and the compassion and social consequences for doing misdeeds was increased - it was far too forgiving to make much of a difference, originally.

It feels strange to say it’s done - though it’s technically met all of its initial goals, there have been various perpiheral features (like images and sounds) that I would have liked to add if I had more time. Furthermore, my creative writing skills tend to focus on characterization and character-building, and I never really got the chance to flex those muscles in this particular narrative. I think this issue arose primarily from my inexperience with non-fiction. I spent a lot of time worrying I wasn’t being accurate enough, which made me reluctant to take any risks with the characters or setting - which may be one of the reasons the characters may seem to come across as ethereal and passive, at least from my perspective.

Hair-Tearing

Funnily enough, most of the time spent on this phase was spent grappling with Hugo, which is the code foundation you are reading this text on. The Academic theme for Hugo, which I am using, does not appreciate it when you date posts in the future. Seeing as I had released Devlog Eight at 1am, attempting to release this Devlog on the same day meant they were listed alphabetically rather than chronologically, since they were on the same date - and Devlog Eight was organized above Devlog Nine. To remedy this, I attempted to set Devlog Nine’s creation date to December 3rd, which is tomorrow. I assumed this would work without error - instead, the devlog refused to upload entirely. After agonizing over this rather simple ‘bug’ for hours, I eventually concluded - after returning to the error after a break - that dating your Hugo posts into the future does not release that post immediately with the future date, but actually holds onto your post, unpublished, and promptly publishes it automatically when the designated date comes to actually pass.

This may seem like a trivial discovery, and it is. But it had aggravated me far more than any part of my actual Twine game - at least then I felt somewhat in control of my own screw-ups. In this case, it seemed (at first) that the software was to blame. I had been experiencing a compiler error on this site for some weeks, which had gone completely unnoticed as it had not adversely effected my ability to post. Upon noticing it while struggling with the date fiasco, however, I started to suspect that this compiler error was the cause of my latest devlog failing to upload. Now that I discovered the more probable cause, I have decided, naturally, to let the compiler continue to throw errors at me - they don’t seem to interfere with my posting, so why bother? This may all seem like a tangent, but it actually reflects something very important in the field of Digital Humanities: it’s okay to struggle with the machine, it’s okay to step away and breathe, and it’s okay to make mistakes. These devlogs are still part of my project, and grappling with them is just as important as grappling with Twine.