Happy New Years, everyone. May 2010 be as good as 2009 if this year was good for you or better if it wasn't.
I also get to mark another year gone without TMGS seeing the light of day. The good news is that it's now close and getting closer all the time. The major bugs are all out and I don't imagine I'll need to add any more content. I like the way it plays, my alpha feedback was generally good, and I've already finished the adjustments to account for the few significant suggestions for improvement I received. I'm now to the point where I can say it will be released as soon as I am confident in its level of polish.
That's where the beta-testing comes in. Yesterday, I got the campaign to my lone beta-tester. Yup, that's all I've got for now, so most of the beta will be me, and I've simply got to take a short break before I play through it all again.
In the interim, I've been playing through SoZ again... oh, and watching football and eating, etc. And then I've received my copy of Tudors Season 3. Gotta get through that!
Thursday, December 31, 2009
Tuesday, December 15, 2009
Schadenfreude
Well, all my changes from Alazander's comments are incorporated and I'm well into my next play-through. In fact, I just started Act III, which means I should be finished in a day or two. Right now I am at 124 comments, and that will almost certainly reach 160 or so by the end. Granted, most of these are very minor things like dialog formatting and very few at this point are genuine bugs.
However, it's disheartening that not a play-through goes by in which I don't find 100+ items to fix. I don't want to release a non-polished module, and I don't think I can feel really comfortable with a final release until a play-through only finds about 10 to 15 items, all of them minor.
Nevertheless, I'm not going to let this stop my beta phase from proceeding. Once I correct the comments from this round of testing, it's on to the beta. I still have room for other beta-testers, by the way, if anyone is interested. (And it would still be appreciated.)
So switching gears, what does the title of this post refer to? Another question will yield the answer, and that question is why is this man-boy crying?
Well, it probably has something to do with that top line and the fact that 13 < 32. Actually, in mathematical terms, 13 << 32. Any sports fan in the US who has not been in a cave these last couple weeks knows one thing: that Tiger Woods has ruined his image. But if they know two things, then it’s that the so-called best college football team in the country got DEE-STROYED a couple weekends ago, leading to the copious quantities of tears that emanated from the face of the tough guy above.
And I have to admit, I soak it up. Why? I hate that team, and I'm not fond of the goofball who leads them. That would be Tim Tebow, who the media obsesses over almost as much as they do/did Tiger. I blogged about Time Tebow before, for those with a good memory. If I'd been there, I'd have licked the tears off his face because to me that's the nectar of the gods.
Thankfully, the Alabama Crimson Tide saved my favorite sport for me. I was really starting to hate football...
However, it's disheartening that not a play-through goes by in which I don't find 100+ items to fix. I don't want to release a non-polished module, and I don't think I can feel really comfortable with a final release until a play-through only finds about 10 to 15 items, all of them minor.
Nevertheless, I'm not going to let this stop my beta phase from proceeding. Once I correct the comments from this round of testing, it's on to the beta. I still have room for other beta-testers, by the way, if anyone is interested. (And it would still be appreciated.)
So switching gears, what does the title of this post refer to? Another question will yield the answer, and that question is why is this man-boy crying?
Well, it probably has something to do with that top line and the fact that 13 < 32. Actually, in mathematical terms, 13 << 32. Any sports fan in the US who has not been in a cave these last couple weeks knows one thing: that Tiger Woods has ruined his image. But if they know two things, then it’s that the so-called best college football team in the country got DEE-STROYED a couple weekends ago, leading to the copious quantities of tears that emanated from the face of the tough guy above.
And I have to admit, I soak it up. Why? I hate that team, and I'm not fond of the goofball who leads them. That would be Tim Tebow, who the media obsesses over almost as much as they do/did Tiger. I blogged about Time Tebow before, for those with a good memory. If I'd been there, I'd have licked the tears off his face because to me that's the nectar of the gods.
Thankfully, the Alabama Crimson Tide saved my favorite sport for me. I was really starting to hate football...
Tuesday, December 1, 2009
I'm Back
So updates have been scarce recently. Lot's of reasons for that, but my time-table for testing TMGS is still on track. I'm working through a couple remaining issues from one of Luke's comments that required some reorganizing of a few dialogs, but progress is steady, if slow. I do think the end result will be better.
Caribbean Cruise
So my wife and I went on our first ocean-going cruise this past week. There was some good and some bad to it. Overall, I wasn't real thrilled with the lack of flexibility and the comparatively small amount of time in the countries we visited, but having the hotel essentially move with you is nice. We spent a couple days in Mexico, one in Belize, and one in Guatemala - very different from our other trips. We got to see a few Mayan ruins and zipline through some rain forests. Pictures included.
Our next trip is shaping up, and we're pretty much 100% set on spending a week on our own driving through Ireland. Should be fun with that whole left-side-of-the-road thing. Be scared, ye Irishmen and women.
So as we're going to be free-form and the itinerary is currently wide open, I'll put it out for the faithful readers who are either Irish nationals or familiar with the country. Is there anything that is considered a "must-see" in the country? This could be either a city or a specific site. Hopefully, we'll find some really great things that aren't necessarily in the guide books. We'll obviously fly in and out of Dublin, but anything else is open.
Cleopatra and Antony
One of my big reads during the cruise was Cleopatra and Antony by Diana Preston. I won't review the book here, but it was one of my selections following my viewing of the second season of Rome. It did a great job of filling in the gaps in the very fast-paced narrative of the final episodes and made several of the scenes make more sense. It also confirmed the number of small details that the TV series included that were absolutely true. (For example, Antony really did challenge Octavian to individual combat after his defeat at Actium.) I'm still going to read a few other books before I settle on my opinion of the depiction of the Egyptian court.
Overall, it was a very easy read for anyone interested in the period. In other words, it was written for the general enthusiast as opposed to a scholar.
Caribbean Cruise
So my wife and I went on our first ocean-going cruise this past week. There was some good and some bad to it. Overall, I wasn't real thrilled with the lack of flexibility and the comparatively small amount of time in the countries we visited, but having the hotel essentially move with you is nice. We spent a couple days in Mexico, one in Belize, and one in Guatemala - very different from our other trips. We got to see a few Mayan ruins and zipline through some rain forests. Pictures included.
Our next trip is shaping up, and we're pretty much 100% set on spending a week on our own driving through Ireland. Should be fun with that whole left-side-of-the-road thing. Be scared, ye Irishmen and women.So as we're going to be free-form and the itinerary is currently wide open, I'll put it out for the faithful readers who are either Irish nationals or familiar with the country. Is there anything that is considered a "must-see" in the country? This could be either a city or a specific site. Hopefully, we'll find some really great things that aren't necessarily in the guide books. We'll obviously fly in and out of Dublin, but anything else is open.
Cleopatra and Antony
One of my big reads during the cruise was Cleopatra and Antony by Diana Preston. I won't review the book here, but it was one of my selections following my viewing of the second season of Rome. It did a great job of filling in the gaps in the very fast-paced narrative of the final episodes and made several of the scenes make more sense. It also confirmed the number of small details that the TV series included that were absolutely true. (For example, Antony really did challenge Octavian to individual combat after his defeat at Actium.) I'm still going to read a few other books before I settle on my opinion of the depiction of the Egyptian court.Overall, it was a very easy read for anyone interested in the period. In other words, it was written for the general enthusiast as opposed to a scholar.