I made a decision with Kudos 2 that I was going to get everything working and looking how I wanted, regardless of how much hassle was involved. Partly this just means changing my state of mind when I’m typing out my ‘todo’ list as I test the game. Rather than mentally editing it to take into account technical difficulties, I just jot down how to improve the game and tell myself not to worry about what’s involved. Then when I go to implement them, I just do it, regardless how awkward some things are.
An example of this was the panel that shows the players skills. This panel just sat there and didn’t have the status update balloons which flash up when you change your attributes, but when playing it occurred to me that this would be a good idea, especially on the ‘post mortem’ screen where many of them change. Making them show up at all involved a ton of recoding. Then I hit the issue that you can have a lot of skills, and they looked horridly cluttered on that post-mortem screen.
So eventually I had to write a bunch of extra code for the skills GUI that rebuilds it just for the post-mortem screen, showing just what’s changed. This is great for the player but was a bitch to code. Hopefully, if I can keep developing like this, the game will have a far more polished feel than anything else I’ve done.
BTW server is a bit slashdotted today…