Week 10: Blog 10 (Detailed Analysis of Economies in MMOs)

The final week. More cramming done. In hindsight, I should’ve not lost those two weeks in the middle of the project randomly and/or started two weeks earlier. Game development is a lot harder than I expected…

• Monday, last touchups on the basic framework. Started doing all of the art stuff. Shoved in some elevator music that I found on the internet into the game (with credit of course). Additionally, did some minor UI changes to try and make the game a little easier on the eyes. 
• Tuesday, tried to get some sort of playable test build out. It’s still far rougher than where I’d like it to be, but everything works. Honestly a huge accomplishment considering all of the setbacks I’ve had during this project, so I’ll take whatever small victory I can at this point. Did some adjusting, made the textboxes slightly cleaner and made sure scrollbars work roughly as intended (preventing text overflow from their boxes), finished that one phone sprite I was meaning to do all along, and adding an actions counter to the top of the screen to help indicate how many actions the player had left. It did remind me to add a cool next week transition rather than the one I have now.
  That aside, sent it out for testing.
• Wednesday, tried to make a tutorial for the game. It was miserable, simply speaking — almost as much time making the actual framework for the game. On the bright side, there is a tutorial now! The only major flaw being that the player has to play through it every single time because I don’t have save data. Yikes.
  Added some BBcode colored text to make the walls of text slightly more engaging and easier to read. Stock price raises and falls, information segments, etc. The only thing I wish I could’ve done was something along the lines of a generative stock line detailing the prices over time, although that would’ve been far too hard to realistically do with the short amount of time that I have left. Go figure.
• Thursday, ported in the fancy buttons. That’s it, along with all of the text files from the python version, poor taste included. Making sure all of those worked took a while, mainly going through all of them.
• Friday, did a last checkup on the “final” state. If I’m being honest, I’m not exactly satisfied with the way it turned out. Had I known that the editor would’ve taken a lot longer than seven weeks, I would’ve secretly started this project all the way back in October when I first got the idea for it. All things considered, however, I’m fairly happy with my end product.