> How about an update on how your AGL game is coming?
>
> To reciprocate, I did some significant work on "The Game of the Ages" today. I'm in the end stages of the coding for the first of the three worlds in the game -- not bad considering I have yet to sit down and do a serious no-holds-barred coding session on it.

I had taken a two-week hiatus from my AGL project, but put in some work on it every day last week. It's difficult to progress as rapidly as I'd like, partly because I'm most often limited to writing over my lunch hour and after 11:00pm or so, when Jacqueline has gone to bed.

Another impediment is the sheer volume of writing (at least, for someone whose creative writing is a bit out of practice), which results from one of the design features of the game. (This won't really be a spoiler; don't worry.) The game takes place over four nights and three days, and keeps track of the progression of time each day based on the player's accomplishment of three or four key tasks, after which he's free to retire for the night. The time then rolls over to the following day.

For each day (and some parts thereof), there is a universal variable, and very many locations check to see which day it is and then display a different description based on that time frame. This means that, in effect, I've got to write several different descriptions for many locations, which, although too much fun to be thought of as tedious, is still time-consuming.

I'm also sweating through ways to allow for extended dialogue without requiring the reader to scan through eighty lines of text on a page. There are a couple of "information dumps" in the story (sorry, Dave), and I've introduced some semi-artificial ways to break up a long monologue, for example, with character reactions and interruptions. Stuff like that requires quite a bit of tweaking; I want to get in enough information to do justice to the story and the mood, but not so much as to bore the player to tears.

Thankfully, I'm interested in the story and the characters enough to be pretty sure of having enough steam to finish the project. I just wish I had longer stretches of time to work on it. Okay, admittedly I've also been reading a lot of Henry James for pleasure lately; maybe I need to put that stuff aside for awhile and try to crank out more writing. We'll see.

I'd sure like to hear from Stephen again, too. If he's ever able to get his AGL project on track and eventually completed, I'll be pretty psyched to play it. His whole game idea was so widely different from mine, I was looking forward to there being two AGL submissions to RinkWorks offering different styles of play.

Iss