In between family visits, tax time, and commodities volatility I did manage to get a good amount of design work completed on core game mechanics. When I implemented my minimalist simulator last month I ran into some areas of game mechanics that I had clearly not detailed out sufficiently, but in the interest of just getting something up and going I had hacked up some mechanics that seemed to line up with my high level design.
After investing the time to detail out the mechanics properly, what I hacked up doesn’t cut the mustard, so I’ll need to do some refactoring on the simulator. In addition to detailing out new game mechanics I managed to get a good part of the new mechanics needed for my first milestone (or iteration if you prefer) coded and unit tested. I’ve got 10 days until friends come into town and before then I figure I should be able to get the remainder of the new mechanics coded up with unit tests and the the simulator refactored to make use of the new code even with the distraction of needing to follow commodities closely at present.
The next step will be to get the designer going without any UI just to get the distribution infrastructure in place. At that point I can design some units by hard coding them into the designer code base (advantage to dynamic languages, like python, here as for not needing to compile and link) to see if its fun or not. If it isn’t fun, I’ll move onto my second milestone without adding coding the UI for the designer. If it isn’t fun after the second, my current road map has thirteen milestones, and I figure I should just keep at it up through the 5th milestone before doing a reassessment if necessary.
Josh Heitzman on Codecrafting 