Autumn break was great! I highly recommend taking sizable breaks every now and again to gain perspective on a project if you can afford them.
For those who don't know I effectively stopped all work at the EDIGames office (and thus Revel Immortal) September 1, and I've been back in action since November 1.
So first, what was I doing, and big revelations:
With my two months of 'free time' I was mostly finishing my basement, and spending time with my wife during our favorite season.
Doing some manual labor was a nice change from being buried behind a desk for the last six months.
Revelation 1: Before the break I was pretty writter-blocked
Story wasn't flowing as easy as it should, thankfully getting away from it has helped a lot in this capacity.
Revelation 2: Playing some new games during the break has given me some perspective
During the break I was able to play Fez, FTL and Limbo; some games I'd been meaning to play for a while. These gave me some good ideas about how to tweak revel; but mostly about certain aspect of game-elegance; and not making an rpg that is just a wirey mess.
Revelation 3: The data has gotten wildly out of control
When I started Revel Immortal around Jan 1 2013 (the Alpha was april 15th); I sort of lied to myself thinking that I could manage all of the data in revel through associated text and data files; and some simple ad-hoc tools.
But this lie was intentional, I had to be flexible with the data and structure design as the alpha evolved; and I know from experience, having a full fledged editor during this process can hamper you... dramatically.
Thankfully we are out of that phase now, and so I have started work, on the Revel Editor:
I am happy to say that after only a week and a half of effort, it is very functional and is exporting build data that Revel Immortal can happily run.
The Revel Editor basically wraps all the data structures that existed previously in files and adds a lot of 'editor leverage' in terms of automating processes and making sure data is correct and organized.
