Progress Report V

Don't be fooled by the massive jump in word count... because of technical reasons, I had to remove the AIF extension I was using and replace it with one of my own design (Actually, Simpler AIF, which can be downloaded from the AIF archive). The bad news is that I'm going to have to revise my word count estimate for Playoffs to be about 100,000 words. The ambivalent news is that there will essentially be only basic layered clothing, which means less complicated (but hopefully not less good) sex scenes with faster development times. The good news is that the game is running much smoother than it was before, since Simpler AIF has, I think, fewer moving parts and better suited for large, complicated projects like Soccer Story.

So, much of the work this week was devoted to getting my AIF extension up to snuff (I'm hoping to release relatively soon). I've rewritten the documentation and extension is much more robust in general. The remainder of the work this week has been devoted to the soccer game play, specifically in information feedback. I was not going to include announcer commentary, but I realized as I was actually playing the game that it was a) difficult to know what was going on b) seemed kind of random because I didn't have a sense of what the margin of success was. Specifically, I had a terrible shooter score against my amazing goalie, and that frustrated me. Now, the commentator will hint by what margin you managed to score or miss, and when I replayed it the game told me it was some crazy fluke I could not have anticipated. In addition, commentators will give an overview of the situation, perhaps hinting gently at what your next action should be, and, if nothing else, provide some color commentary on players and opposing teams.

Summary

(Edit) An important milestone this week -- Soccer Story is now longer than Bad Sister, which was 55,000 words long.

Because everything I did this week was stuff I had not anticipated working on, nothing is getting ticked up. That said, I'm still feeling pretty good about the project and things are still humming along nicely.

Total Word Count: 60837 (up 8932 this week from 51905)

The Acts

Act 1
Design: 100%
Prose: 100%
Internal Polish 20%
External Playtesting 0%

Act 2
Design: 40%
Prose: 10%
Playtesting/Polish: 0%

Act 3
Design: 10%
Prose: 0%
Playtesting/Polish: 0%

Gameplay

Soccer Gameplay

Design 100% Programming 75% Playtesting/Balance 30%

Team Management

Design 70% Programming 25% Playtesting/Balance 0%

Characters

Recruitable Character 1: Prose 20%, Sex Scenes 0%, Romantic Sub-Plot 0%

Recruitable Character 2: Prose 10%, Sex Scenes 0%,

Recruitable Character 3: Prose 10%, Sex Scenes 0%

Recruitable Character 4: Prose 1%, Sex Scenes 0%

Recruitable Character 5: Prose 1%, Sex Scenes 0%

Recruitable Character 6: Prose 1%, Sex Scenes 0%

Recruitable Character 7: Prose 1%, Sex Scenes 0%

Recruitable Character 8: Prose 1%, Sex Scenes 0%

Recruitable Character 9: Prose 1%, Sex Scenes 0%

Recruitable Character 10: Prose 1%, Sex Scenes 0%

Recruitable Character 11: Prose 1%, Sex Scenes 0%

Recruitable Character 12: Prose 1%, Sex Scenes 0%

Note: all the percentages are estimates.