I should have all the remaining dialog "bugs" fixed by tonight (or first thing tomorrow at the latest). Those are all the places where I thought "somebody should say something here" when going through the game from start to finish two weeks ago. Then I'll send the game off to a couple of new testers for final testing (once again, if any previous testers want a more recent version, let me know!)

PS I hope the word "testers" doesn't sound condescending. I try to make it sound like I have an army of servants ready to drop everything and do my bidding. In reality, at this stage there are five people who said they'd like to do the final beta test of the game. Of those, one has been unable due to unexpected work and family pressures (perfectly understandable - with the news, Thanksgiving, Christmas, etc.), one more has done a fantastic job of ploughing through it, and the others never got back to me.

Once again I have to say a big thank you again to everyone who's ever given any feedback.

And for the final test? Yesterday a friend said he was part of a World of Warcraft clan and they'd be willing to give it a shot. The idea's crazy enough that I said, "why not!" If anyone is known for determination to grind through to the end no matter what the cost, it's WofW players.

But the likelihood of a rogue game accidentally finding its way to a torrent site is quite high. I can't stop people pirating it (I'd be far more worried if they didn't want to pirate it), but I don't want people to think the unfinished version is the finished version. So I've added the "test game" label to every screen, and also a big message at the very start so nobody can be in any doubt.

That's interesting. Someone just left a message on YouTube about the game, about how they're stuck at a certain point. Obviously they're using some really early test version. Which means that test versions have already escaped into the wild! Hopefully people will see the big "this is a test version" message on every screen and figure out it isn't the FINAL version. It actually makes me feel good that somebody thinks that even the early, broken, highly unfinished version might be worth playing.

I have fifty more clues to add (the easiest ones from the original 381 bugs). They should be done by tomorrow, then I'm going to send the "finished" game to some completely fresh testers, to catch anything I've missed. Any other testers who want the newer version, just let me know.

Sixteen days to go. Today I made yet another change to the opening sequence, to make it more dramatic, clearer, make the first task more obvious, and give a stronger start to the whole series.

It's funny really, of all the stories to choose to start this project, Les Miserables is possibly the hardest. That was part of the reason for choosing it - if I can make an adventure game based on Les Miserables, I can make an adventure game based on anything. Why is Les Miserables such a challenge? Well can you think of ANY other story ever that has a LESS dramatic start? The book begins with chapter after chapter about what a nice guy bishop Myriel is. Then the size of the book - it covers (from Valjean being imprisoned until his death) about forty years, and worse, even when Valjean is there the story is often about other people (Fantine, Marius, etc.) And the drama - the climax and ending are very UN-dramatic. The barricades fail, and there's not even any hand to hand fighting, and at the end, Valjean just dies in his bed and the people around him are upset and think it's so unfair. Really, the only power of the book comes from melodrama - from terrible things happening to people. But the nature of a game is the user would naturally try to STOP those things from happening. Cosette growing up at the Thenardiers, Valjean stealing the loaf, Valjean's attempts to escape, just about EVERY major event is something where the user would naturally do the opposite of what the book requires.

And finally, the length of the book, for a first ever game... simply getting the game in a reasonable playable state has been a major achievement.

So it makes me smile that I've chosen such an impossible task. and the good news is that after this it should be easy. Future games will be better in every way, now that I'm finally learning how to do it. This isn't intended to talk down the game Les Miserables - I think it's pretty awesome. But future games will be even awesomer.

Thursday evening:
The graphics disaster was fixed far more quickly than I expected (as far as I can tell! Fingers crossed.) And a few other changes I had scheduled for today turned out to be simpler and quicker than expected. The phrase "simpler and quicker than I expected" is not something I'm used to.

In fact, the last week has seen several small successes like that, and it's now at least a month since any major bugs appeared. By 'major' I mean bugs where I can't see the obvious solution, bugs that get bigger as I work on them. For the last three years (i.e. since I started working to a deadline, and putting in long hours) I've seen bug after bug after bug. And each one seemed to lead to another one. This was entirely expected - I've never made a game before, I'm starting with a large game, it's not like any other game ever made, and the only thing smaller than my experience is my budget. So "unexpected problems" were part of the plan. But still, when you know that everything you do will have to be done again at least twice, when you've been working on something for years and years and very little of it is usable, it does rather sap your enthusiasm. The only thing that's kept me going was shear orneriness. An act of will.

We're 17 days from the first release, and I'm feeling more optimistic than at any time in the past ten years.

This was always part of the plan, I knew the era of maddening bugs would end, and we'd enter the promised land of actually being in control of the game. But after ten years I found it hard to be enthusiastic. Now at last, over the last few weeks the work have started to go smoothly. At long, long last. Problems are being solved more quickly. Unexpected problems are all fixable in a reasonable time. Yes there are still bugs, but they are bugs I can fix. Yes, there are a lot of things I would do differently in hindsight, but that's the whole point of making a new story every six months. Each one improves on the one before. Rome wasn't built in a day.

A couple of other things have happened in the last few days that have really made me optimistic. Long time readers will know that I planned to spend the last month simply responding to what testers said. The 'last month' turned into the 'last two weeks' but I'm still on track: the last two weeks (December 1st-15th) is essentially free. And the great news is that no serious changes are needed. Which means I can spend that time doing what the game REALLY needs - just playing it through improving it here and there. Fixing dialog, adding clues, making it look better. That really is the best use of the two weeks.

I'm finally starting to feel optimistic, like I'm not defying the odds, but working with them.

Thursday morning:
Small disaster: when saving the game yesterday morning the power went off, corrupting the files. And it's ten days since I did a proper offline backup (I was overdue for another backup). I think it's just graphics that are lost, and they haven't changed much in the last ten days. So I can recover most of them, and I always save major new pictures as separate graphics files anyway. The only long term damage is some minor changes may be lost - like when I change someone's eyes or remove some rogue pixels, I do that kind of thing all the time and forget what I did five minutes later.

Hopefully everything important will be working normally by the end of today.

In unrelated noise, there was ALMOST a disaster yesterday, when it looked like the Linux engine was unable to perform a crucial task that I rely on in the game. But it now looks like that will work after all. That's a relief!

Feedback from testers so far (i.e. from Caius - that guy deserves a medal) is reassuring. Plenty of little things need changing, but from coding point of view they're relatively simple. The one I was most worried about was Valjean's habit of walking in circles before leaving a room. Turns out, that was a simple problem too. I have Valjean walk to the nearest place to where you click the mouse, but I forgot that he walks a little way BEFORE the mouse position is checked. The mouse often moves, and that's why he walks to random places before going where he's supposed to. That's easy to fix. Other problems - such as the lack of clues in certain places - are already on my to-do list.

Eighteen days to go and I'm cautiously optimistic.

Today I don't have much time, but I'll be fixing it so that followers (i,e, Valjean and occasionally Cosette) can jump straight to rooms that are selected in the map screen, instead of having to walk through all the rooms in between. And also checking that the kneeling costume doesn't go weird any more, and trying to get to the bottom of the "turn around before exiting" bug. Then if I have time, it's back to dialog.

Incidentally, some of the dialog is becoming a kind of Easter Egg. Not deliberately, but I realise that some of the characters have more dialog than others, and most of this will only be discovered by accident. For example, the girls in the convent school - I don't expect anyone will click on them, but if they do, the girls say some light hearted stuff from the book. (That isn't in the test version, I only just added it). Also there are a couple of animations that probably nobody will ever see, because they were designed for tasks that have since been dropped. Nothing amazing, but if (for example) you go to the back of the convent during the barricades, you see smoke arising from that general direction. It's not earth shattering, but I think it looks nice. :)

If anyone who's already testing the game wants a more up to date copy, let me know.

I looked into the translation issue some more and I think I can have it up and running the same day the game goes live - that is, 15th December. Today I worked on the revised web site, and it has a page on translation. You'll be able to download the full text of the game from there, along with other useful information.

Back on the 'real' work, I've about finished the non-dialog bugs (20 to go, I'll do those in the morning), so tomorrow I start attacking the dialog again. So much to do!

I've been thinking about foreign language versions of the game. This is not an urgent priority, but some time over the next year I'll probably add a page where people can earn money by making their own translation. That way, the game will be available in any language people want. Here's how it would work:

EnterTheStory.com will have a page with links to the raw text from every game. If anyone sends in a translated version I'll make a translated game and add it to the download site. The person who translated it then gets a cut of every game that's sold in that translation. An easy way to make money!

More details: I don't speak any other languages, so the first time someone translated a game I'd need to get someone else to check it. So we don't have "all your base are belong to us" (the world's most famous game translation by a non-native speaker!). Those two people would then get half the royalties each. If there were no serious problems then the next time that person translated a game they could do it without any checking and get all the money themselves.

I'm hoping this would encourage a lot of translations. There's a financial incentive to get in early - if you're the first person to do a German translation of the first game and if (in 2 or 5 years time) it ends up selling tens of thousands of copies, that's a lot of money. Germany is a BIG market for adventure games. And so is France, particularly for a game set in France. It would be really great if the game ended up available in Swahili and Vietnamese. In these days of laptops in developing countries it might be a good way for a student to earn money.

How much money would each translator get? It would have to be at least 20% of the cover price, or there would be no incentive to start. But if it was much more than 40% then it would be simpler for me to wait a few years until the game is more popular then pay a one-off fee to a professional translation service. And maybe the foreign language versions would be cheaper anyway - $14.99 is not much to an American game buyer, but might be prohibitively expensive to someone in sub-Saharan Africa. But those are details.

How exactly would the money be calculated? This isn't as simple as it seems, since the business model is "buy one, get everything else free." So you'd only get money if the first game downloaded was in your language. But that's only reasonable I suppose. A Vietnamese speaker is more likely to download the Vietnamese version first.

How would you get the money? I don't want to spend all my time on paperwork, so there's be two choices. The easy-but-slow way (for you) is to let me count how many Vietnamese versions have sold every 6 months and PayPal you the appropriate amount. The more efficient way is for the translator to sign up for their own BMT account (BMT Micro will host the games) and become an affiliate. Then every time a Vietnamese game is sold the right money is immediately transferred to the translator's account and they get a payment from BMT each month.

This is something I've been giving a lot of thought. I think that plan would work best. I love how this plan gives freedom to the users. You want a version in your language? Then go for it - and make money at the same time. Heck, if you're smart (and lucky) you could find some completely untapped market and make yourself a ton of money. The only down side is that I can only use a standard Western character set. But if there's enough interest I could probably find a way to use the Chinese alphabet or whatever else was needed.

Obviously there's the risk that somebody would make a translation then sell it from their own site, but that's a risk in English anyway. And if the translator themself doe it then I can just cancel their royalties from the main site. Besides, I think 40% from the main site is pretty generous since they wouldn't have to do any work.

That's why the game refers to EnterTheStory.com in big letters at various points (the title screen, the help page, the credits page, whenever you try to walk to a story that isn't made yet). And the licence agreement will make clear that ONLY games downloaded from EnterTheStory.com are legal. Piracy is unavoidable, but I intend to make it very easy and very affordable to get a legal copy, and the serial nature of the game means there's always a gravitational pull to the main site for the latest information and downloads.

Why give translators 30-40%? Why not less, or why not more? After all, without a translator the game simply wouldn't be available at all in that language. True, but the same can be said for music, art, and everything else. If the game ever makes any serious money I want to reward everyone who's made a major contribution, not just translators.

23 days to go, and I'm gradually ticking off everything that needs to be done:

known bugs: 100 non-text and 150 text changes to go (7 days?)

changes to the story: I'm still not happy with how it starts. Don't worry, the events won't change, but the dialog will. I've been reading up on how to start a story and I think, as the opening to what will be a very large series of games, what Peri and her mother say can be greatly improved.

unknown bugs and changes suggested by testers: the last 2 weeks.

general improvements to dialog: this is what I'll do if there's any time left.

shopping basket: works, but I need to clarify some details with BMT regarding buy-one-get-the-next-two-free

revised web site: planned, and should take just 1 day to implement.

demo game: this is the one most likely to slip. It's quite likely that the full game plus copious screenshots will be available on 15th December, but the demo won't be available until the 17th. This is because the demo is a cut-down version of the finished game. If I make the demo too soon then it won't reflect any last minute changes in the underlying code: the whole point of the demo is to show that the game will play reliably on a particular computer.

videos of game play: the demo is short (for bandwidth reasons) so I was planning on relying more on videos to show the game in progress. However, my computer isn't fast enough to play the game AND capture 30 frames a second. And I don't have the time to work out some kind of video connection from the back (experience tells me this would take at least a week for various reasons that are too boring to go into). So I had planned on asking some kind soul at indiegamers.com to grab some footage for me. But the chances are very high that they wouldn't choose the footage I would choose (it's too much to ask to get them to play the entire game and video everything then edit the best bits it for me), so any in-game video is likely to show boring scene changes. So if I do use videos they'll be secondary - the main selling point will be the screenshots of key moments.

Two things to remember:
1. This this is not a "Hollywood style" one day big bang launch. It's deliberately low key. I'm not announcing it anywhere except here, and to the people who have asked to be emailed when it's released. The BIG launch will be in June when I have six months of experience, two stories completed, and the third on its way.
2. The big concept behind this game is to have lots of stories. I don't want people judging the whole thing by how well Les Miserables plays - it's only a small part of the whole. Each story is like a single episode ina TV series, or a single issue of Classics Illustrated. "Quantum Leap" is probably the best parallel. Obviously I hope Les Miserables is a rewarding experience on its own, but I don't expect people to finish saying "that was the best game ever." I'm hoping they finish and think "I wonder what happens next." It's a series. Hence I'm not promoting the game until the second part, when people can see each story in the context of a much larger whole.

Wow, I didn't blog yesterday, and didn't even notice. Told you I was busy! I didn't just do the easy bugs, but tackled some harder ones as well. Including the Fantine death scene, the rigging scene, I wrote new "previous music" code (so you can now recall the last ten pieces of music, not just the past 2), improved the 'extra large' font and made various other changes. More of the same today.
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Pretty soon I'll need to organize the payment system and get some in game videos so people can see what the game looks like. So much to do!

About 30 of the 381 bugs were simply lines that were too wide. Often it was hard to see who was talking because the text was almost the full width of the screen. So I just changed the 'talk' code so the lines aren't so wide. Now, as far as possible, it's easier to identify where its coming from. (I toyed with the idea of adding a line from the words to the person, comic book style, but experience tells me that would cause as many problems as it solves.) Another 50 or so bugs (off the top of my head - I haven't actually counted every category) are simple spelling mistakes, so I can fix those very quickly to night. Then tomorrow I'll fix all the very easiest bugs and get the total down to maybe 150 or so.

I just wrote a lot more and deleted it. I think it's best now to wait and see what other say.

I just uploaded the test game to its top secret location and I'm off to bed now. If you asked to be a beta tester ages ago didn't get an email, let me know. I'm sure I forgot someone along the way, so apologies if it was you!

- Chris

28 days to go...

Here's how it stands: as you may have noticed over the past few years, I make estimates based on what I know. E.g. "it takes 1 day to finish 1 event, I have 10 events, so it needs 10 days." Then invariably I find some coding problem and spend the time fixing that instead.

And so it is that I planned to have everything in the game by last Saturday, leaving exactly a month to make changes suggested by other people. But instead I've spent most of my time on bugs. But the good news it that I've been playing the game in depth for the past two days and haven't found any new major bugs. IT'S FINALLY STABLE! HURRAH!

I'l upload the game for testing tonight.

The first ten events (out of 120) are "finished" - you should be able to play the game normally up to where Valjean starts his new life.

The rest of the game needs cosmetic changes, but is playable. Some clues are only given once (I'll add more over the next week), so you'll need to make use of the "past dialog" feature. Or use the F1 clues if you get stuck.

I have a very long list of things that need changing, but NONE OF THEM INVOLVE CHANGING THE UNDERLYING CODE. That's the important thing. I just need to change dialog, positions, colors, dialog, speed, etc. I might be able to get them done in the next week, but it will probably take two.

Only 28 days to go!

Another short blog today! too busy working on the game. :)

I was going to write a long blog entry today, but I think it would be better to spend that time on the game!

31 days to go! This one's going to go to the wire :) I added a new animation to the fire rescue (actually an old animation that I couldn't fit in before, but I found a way to fit it in), created a new "arms in the air triumphant" animation for Valjean, found a way to use an extra-large font for shouting, and made various other improvements. Today I'm doing a speed play through the whole thing to see how long it takes and catch any major probems that I missed (i.e. crashes).

Message to anyone who's ever tested the game and left feedback: And also those who have already kindly agreed to test the game from Monday (you know who you are!)

If you want your name to appear in the game credits, let me know how you want to be named (and if you like I can add a reference to your web site if you have one). If you let me know by Sunday night then you'll be in credits in the test version, and you can make sure I spell your name right.

Thanks for all your fine work - I couldn't do this without you.

Last week I changed it so that Valjean doesn't follow the mouse unless you click, and he walks to whatever he looks at. Which means it's possible to lose him - if he looks at a tree, for example, he might end up standing behind it and you can't click on him! You can still use the "recent people" screen of course and access him that way, but I think a lot of users wouldn't think of that. So I've added a feature to the space bar option (the one that stops crowds walking and shows big arrows to all exits). Now, if Valjean is anywhere on the scren but small, then he's brought onto the visible screen and has a big circle around him. Also (and this took a while to code), if he's on the visible screen but behind something, he steps aside when you use the space bar. Basically the space bar is the "make stuff easy to see" button.
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In unrelated news (I think) for some reason the game freezes when Valjean looks at anything in the galley. I have no idea why - it doesn't happen for anyone or anything or anywhere else. Yet the galley itself has no special code. It's really weird. So today I'll have to spend some time tracking that down.
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EDIT: after seven hours' work I found it. Turns out it was related to the changes, just not in an obvious way. Valjean walks to what he looks at, unless he's trapped. So when he's in the galleys he tries to walk, can't (because he's chained up) and the code aborts. What I'd forgotten is that the "walk to" code is inside a mini-cut scene (so the user can abort it with a single key press). If a cutscene aborts without calling "end cutscene" then the game freezes. So that's what happened. I'll know if I ever see a freeze again.

Not much to add. Fixing minor bugs in the "walk into room" code.

THE NEXT FIVE YEARS.
This post is more important than my usual "today I'm adding XYZ" post. I've been working on a five year business plan. Each of these milestones is based on number crunching, and should be reliable. (More reliable than my usual estimates anyway.)

• 17th November 2008: upload the test game to selected people. (You knew that already.)
• 15th December 2008: upload finished Les Miserables (you knew that as well)
• 15th May 2009: test the Divine Comedy. Mainly so I can be sure that two stories can interlock happily. After this I probably won't upload later stories for testing. I'll be getting used to the routine, so if you don't like one story just wait for the next one.
• 15th June 2009: upload The Divine Comedy. Promote the game - hopefully getting an article in a newspaper or two. This is the major release, where I go for reviews, interviews, etc. Note that Divine Comedy is relatively short compared with the two stories either side) - so I can make sure it's out on time and really get up to speed in Rapid Game Creation.
  
• 15th December 2009: upload Apeiron, the third story. Apeiron is Greek for "infinity" and the story will combine all the infinite concepts in philosophy and religion. I'm piling in as many cosmic concepts as I can find. Expect multiple layers of heaven, ancient legends, higher dimensions, deep time, magic, and more metaphysics than you can shake a stick at. This is a change from the earlier plan (Julius Caesar) because the more I work on the first two stories, the more it points in this direction. The first three stories form a trilogy, and this is the climax. In Les Miserables we meet Peri, and she passes her first test. In Dante, we meet the rest of the major characters and she arrives in heaven (the place called "heaven" in the first game is just a kind of waiting room just above earth). But Apeiron is the big one where she steps outside of reality as anyone has seen it before and sees the big picture. The REALLY big one. The end of her initial journey, and the start of the REAL mission. It'll be the biggest game ever made (not in terms of scenes, yet, but in terms of the quantity of time and space, different dimensions, huge concepts, etc.). This is where we learn the full extent of Peri's past, her mission, the structure of the omniverse, and how all future stories fit together. If you like stories that make you go "wow" then this is for you. Needless to say, I'm really looking forward to this one.
• 15th June 2010: Shakespeare's Julius Caesar. This naturally grows out of the previous stories and Peri's mission. I also have a major surprise planned that should bring the game to the attention of a lot more people, but it wouldn't be a surprise if I told anyone before it happened. Note that each of the first five stories is a milestone (first story, major release, most important story, major surprise, and then...)
• 15th November 2010: Journey to the Center of the Earth. Yes, you read it right, this one will be finished in just five months. Long term I want to increase the frequency of stories. I'd rather have lots of short stories than a few large ones. This will be the first of the more frequent games, and the the first plain simple adventure without too much heavy stuff (at least until the end :) This is the story I'm most looking forward to, even more than Apeiron. Because it will be the first game that's just plain fun to make: it's my favorite novel, it's just a good read, and from a development point of view it's dead simple - only three main characters, basically just one big cave (after a couple of early scenes in Germany and Iceland). For years I've been collecting good royalty free cave photos. This one's going to be a blast! For me, anyway. And hopefully my fun in making it will show through.
  
• 15th June 2011: Game World (lame provisional title). OK, after saying I was going for quicker releases, I think this one will take slightly longer as I'll need to do a lot more research. This is the first of the playful stories. I've mentioned it a few times over the past months - basically a homage to all the classic games, built round a sequel to my personal favorite game, Zak McKracken, except for copyright reasons certain people will not be seen or named directly. :)
• 15th November 2011: Wuthering Heights. Or possibly The Descent of Man. I think it'll be time to go for something a little but unusual again. Something radically different. I want people to come back to this game because it always has something different, something fresh and surprising.
• 15th April 2012: the apocalypse of Enoch (probably combining other pseudepigraphal works involving Adam). See previous comments about staying fresh. I don't think anyone's ever made a game based on lost books of the Bible before. This is the latest date at which I will have become a full time game developer, based on the "worst case scenario" of sales forecasts. If sales are even worse than that, this is when I hang up my hat and say "no more games - the experiment failed." But I'm quietly confident.
  
• 15th September 2012: Kids' world. This is the first story I began back in 2002, based on drawings by my kids (who'll be a lot older by 2012!). By the way, there's nothing magical about the fifteenth, but it seemed like as good a date as any, and I want to get a reputation for meeting deadlines.
  
• 15th April 2013: War and Peace. The one that was going to be story 2 until recently, but it's just too big, so I'm leaving it until I have a lot more experience. Obviously the exact order of the later stories could change (and probably will), but these are the ones I feel the most urgency about delivering. With the exception of Wuthering Heights, which is mostly there just to add balance.
• 15th September 2013: haven't really decided this one - I wrote a master list of the stories I most want to cover a few months ago, and this will probably be a simple adventure (Treasure Island, something like that). By this time I should have settled down into a routine, working in partnership with other people, and leaving me free to concentrate half my time on my first love, economics.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the next five years in a nutshell.

Today I start another playthrough, making sure the game works with all the recent changes, and adding anything that seems to be needed.

Only 35 days to go! And only 6 days till I send out the "finished" game for testing (were those quotation marks large enough?). There's no more time for adding new stuff. In the last few months I've often made tiny changes that created unexpected bugs - a ten minute change can lead to another change which leads to another change which leads to a week or more of delays. No time for that now.
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I just have to make sure the old stuff works and is reasonably readable. No doubt testers will suggest changes, but every new change is a compromise: time spent on one thing means time not spent on something else. Of course, I could easily take another ten years in improving this game, that's true for any creative work - but I think this time scale is reasonable.
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Expect the "finished" test game on Saturday, or Monday at the latest (I have a week off work to focus on this, ending on Monday 17th).

One step back, two steps forward. Regarding what I wrote yesterday about the moving-between-games code, I'm back to the previous thinking that I should leave focusing on that until the second story. Which means there will probably be a patched version of Les Miserables available when Dante's Inferno is out. With just 35 days to go, I don't think I should send any more time on a feature that will not be needed in the first release. Please note that a patched version will be optional: the game will look the same and play the same, and you will still be able to move between this game and all future games. A patched version would simply allow a more seamless experience, where a person in game 'A' could look at an object in game 'B', and game 'B' could make a new never-before-seen room appear in game 'A.' It may be that none of the future games require anything in Les Miserables (they are far more likely to link among themselves). So don't lose any sleep over the December 15th release not being the "final final" version. For all practical purposes it will be.
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I said "two steps forward" because the best news is that AGS has once again shown itself to be more wonderful than I expected. One of my concerns with linking games is that saved games have to be loaded in the game where they are created. So if you save a game in Les Miserables and then wander over to Dante's Inferno and try to load the old game, the game would crash. Or so I expected. But it turned out that Chris Jones (the hero who created AGS) had anticipated that. If you try to load a different game's saved game, then AGS will first look to see if that other game exists. If it doesn't exist then the game might still crash (I think?), but if the other game exists (as it will if you have both games and haven't deleted one) then AGS will simply move to that game and open the saved game without problems. Which means that SAVED GAMES JUST WORK. You can save any game anywhere, see all the saves everywhere, and load any of them from anywhere, and it will just work. Which is as it should be.

I was very, VERY pleased to discover that. It was the reassurance I needed that the "move between games" problems will be fairly easy to solve, but will be quicker to solve in the summer (when we have two different stories to play with) and so I should not waste any more time on it right now.

I've been thinking a lot about some things Caius said on the subject of saved games. And I think I've worked out a way that it can work a lot better. This won't make much difference to the first story, but will be very significant when other games are added.

In recent months I've been thinking about the code that joins different stories, and frankly it was complicated. I need to focus on getting the first game right, so I had to accept that there would probably be unexpected bugs with the joining code. It was almost inevitable that I'd need to release a patched version of Les Miserables, to fix any unexpected between-games bugs. But the new way I'm considering will be more powerful and robust. I think (fingers crossed) if I incorporate this into the first game then it will last forever. When later stories appear you'll be able to just walk between games without any problems with losing data or stuff not working. You'll also find that new scenes sometimes appear in Les Miserables - scenes that aren't accessible in the first story.

Yes, I think this could work.

Today I'm refining the 'my story' feature where the game remembers everything you ever did. Soon it will be tied to save games: when you save or load a game it will also save or load your dialog history as well.

Today I'm working on a couple of "ten second" changes that turn into "four hour" changes. One is getting Valjean to walk to wherever he looks. Which seems simple, since the walking animation is done, the floor is there, scaling is there, etc., etc., so in theory it's just "walk to X,Y." But in practice all kinds of other code is involved. Things are never simple! :)

Today I'm going through big list of "things to do" that I've been making over the last six months. Little things like adding a line of dialog or changing the color of some text.

Pescao made some really good comments, and I made a really long reply. So that's today's blog!

Y'know, over the past few months 'anonymous' has been asking some very good questions in the 'comments' sections of each day's blog. So if anyone's reading this blog and wants some useful information (instead of my random ramblings) then be sure to check out the comments on previous days - they seldom have anything to do with the topic, but are usually much more useful. I should probably make them the basis of an FAQ... one day.

Someone was discussing Satan on another blog, and it reminded me of my plans for the next story:

Next month I start working on Dante's Inferno, and Satan will be the central figure (literally - the city of Dis is at the center of the earth). If you read the Divine Comedy it obviously reflects medieval values. I intend to make that the central theme of the game, a way to illustrate points of view.

Dis is an immortal giant at the center of the world, in contact with many of the greatest figures from history, so he probably has some interesting insights. Virgil is over 1000 years old and has seen a bit of life. Yet Virgil is condemned as a pagan and Dis is condemned as the personification of evil. It seems to Dante that people are being tortured, but is it possible he's misinterpreting it, Br'er Fox style? The further something is from Dante's understanding, the more evil it appears to him. He jumps to conclusions based on his limited experience.

Virgil and Dis tolerate Dante and his libelous poem because (a) wise beings allow free speech, and (b) even Dis and Virgil were young once.

I finished adding the main clues. I haven't tested all the recent code yet (the new faster clicking code, follower-not-following code, etc.) so will do that tomorrow. I'll then send the "almost finished" version to the Principle Tester (I'm never sure if it should be principAL or principLE - my dictionary says either is acceptable). Then this week and next I'll go through the game puzzle by puzzle, adding in more clues, fixing obvious stuff, and making all those changes I've been meaning to dso but never got round to. (Last night for example I added idling animations for Valjean in the sewers). Then November 15th is the BIG test version. The one that has everything in it.