News You Can Bruise for 2001 April 2

Apparantly, we have gone onto Nowhere Daylight Time and nobody told me about it. I first suspected when I noticed my clock was an hour late yesterday. I only noticed this because at 5 I thought it was 4 and I missed my chance to listen to a radio show which the promo makes seem like a pale American imitation of My Word!. Who decides when this time micromanagement happens? Need it happen in this day and age?

ObSegfault: DST Bug causes Widespread Panic. "In this reporter's opinion, what Los Angeles needs is more freaky chicks with big hair and guns, who ride around on motorcycles and dispense vigilante justice."

Jason on issue tracking: "I have always backed the bug cut plan. Some say it gives too much to the top 1% buggiest developers. But I say, everyone who makes bugs, deserves relief."

So it turns out I was using the 6/10 Inform library for Degeneracy, so I made some diffs and packaged up the source code. Here's the April link to Degeneracy. I should add a third navbar up at the top that I change when I add a new deliverable to the site. Note: the presence of the word "deliverable" in this entry signifies irony.

I'm uncertain as to the value of releasing the source code to and bug list for a work of IF immediately after releasing the work itself. Of course, those who want spoilers at any cost can always disassemble the .z5 file. IF is sort of a special case in programming, and even in game programming, since it's so story-driven and artsy. I don't think I could develop an IF story publicly. I mean, I could do it. Psychologically I would adjust. But it wouldn't feel right, and I don't think it would be as good as it would be if I was able to sit on my vision for the game and not tell anyone about it until I was ready.

That said, I think the basic game structure of Guess the Verb! could have been done a lot better, and that a design session with someone else early on could have made it a much better game. (See upcoming GTV! post-mortem.)

Speaking of which, I really like the developer-written game post-mortems at Gama Sutra, even though I've never played one of the dissected games. I wish that post-mortems could be done for more types of software, but games are 1) relatively unimportant, obviating the need for compulsive litigators to sue because a developer mentioned publicly that a product actually has a defect; 2) a category where, eventually, you can actually claim to be done, rather than just having attained a certain version number.

Back to IF: a whopping *two* bugs were found in the djinn game. I am amazed and flabbergasted, and both bugs have been fixed. It's true that there is always one more bug...

This is the police! We have you surrounded! Stand down from the funk!