Plaidophile

So like, there's a major milestone coming up which kind of appeared out of the blue, and so I'm still at work until like 11 PM tonight even though I'm not being terribly productive.

We have to have a working demo of a few levels by Tuesday, for a focus group, and also for a major "See look at the neat revolutionary gameplay we're working on!" thing for the higher-ups at the parent company on Thursday. Of course, all of us have been working in a fairly fragmented manner and just doing sort of duct-tape-ish solutions which are good enough for building, but certainly not enough for a demo.

The thing is I don't have much to do with the game-level code, but a lot of the game-level code relies on code I wrote (such as the graphics engine, the text layout system, the animation CODEC, etc.), and of course now that we're finally pulling things together for something playable, we're finding all sorts of fun little edge cases (i.e. bugs) which I hadn't accounted for when I wrote the code. So I still have to be here in order to fix them. (Like, one such bug was in the animation CODEC, where an empty delta frame would cause it to crash, since I'd never actually checked to make sure that the frame had any contents.)

At this very moment I'm more or less unmotivated to actually work on my current tasks, which are

1. the save game engine
2. the main menu system
3. the generative music engine (hence the links from earlier today)

because

1. save games are an annoying pain to deal with and some of our internal stuff isn't quite solidified yet
2. the parts of the main menu system which aren't yet implemented rely on the save game system and having various unlockable stuff which we haven't even settled on yet
3. I can work on the music engine theory all day (and I have) but without any loops to work with, I can't even start to put a shell of an engine together to test it, and I can't find any decent freeware/shareware MIDI sequencers for Windows which make it easy to just put out little 8-bar snippets or whatever

So, I think I'll bring my laptop in tomorrow and try out the demo version of Intuem, since that will surely be more useful than just sitting around and chatting on IRC, and would put me squarely back in the realm of Fun Work.

Isn't it just typical how as soon as I finally do get Internet access at home, I can't even enjoy it?