STATUS: Wednesday, October 12th

The Daily Report

Colossal RealmLike update is coming up this evening, if all goes according to plan. I smoothed out the last bump with map loading/saving this morning, leaving me free to get back to the thing I was working on before getting sucked down this rabbit hole: making the level 3 and 5 wizard spells.

It was specifically a teleportation spell that allows you to set (and return to) “spatial anchors” that led me here. I realized that while my map generation procedures could pseudorandomly create identical maps from the same seed each time, those maps had to be accessed sequentially; if you were in the starting town and you tried to teleport to the fourth level of a dungeon on another continent, the game wouldn’t know what to do. Going from “sequential access” to “random access” meant instituting true saving and loading of maps earlier than I’d planned, and it has turned out to be more complicated than I thought to preserve the web of relationships among maps regardless of which order they were loaded in.

But that’s finished, and the spell I was working on when I jumped tracks is now fully implemented. That’s the good news. The bad news is that I’m not sure that I’ll have everything I intended to implement for the wizard finished by close of business day today, but I think I can at least have them tidied up through their current cap of level 3, which is enough for pushing the update out.

It’s easier to add to the game in my spare time and with occasional workdays devoted to it than it is to solve giant technical problems in that way, so from this point on updates should be more like they were the first few weeks instead of taking weeks at a time.  I’ve got a pretty good roadmap for where to go from here.

Financial Status

Once wizards have an equal level cap to the other classes, I’m going to push an update to the downloadable version of RealmLike that not only includes all the new content and advances but enables multiplayer. I’m hoping at that point to get some early access-type sales on it.

The State of the Me

Doing alright.

Plans For Today

I’m about a day behind on things I wanted to write this week. I don’t know that I’m going to get any fiction writing done today before I do a creepy October tale on Twitter later tonight; I really want to get the RealmLike update put to bed around 6:30, and I hadn’t planned on still being debugging the map loading this morning.