Another one bites the dust

I'm finished enough with Forest to cross it off the list, which now stands thusly:

1. Finish the Epilogues
2. Rework "Staying With Rume" in Chapter 1
3. Finish Progue scenes for his "Uncertain" psyche.
4. Finish sketched-but-unwritten portions of The Confrontation.
5. Finish fleshing out and implementing "Forest" and its people.
6. Add support for Intelligent Hinting
7. Finish attitude-adjustment Progue mini-scenes.
8. Go through whole game and solve any structural / derailing issues.
9. Optimise for speed as much as possible.

To celebrate, I'm taking tomorrow off entirely for a much needed break.

One of the funnest things about interactive fiction is you get to design and "build" stuff that you could do in no other medium, including graphical computer games-- at least not as easily. If the standard screenplay advice is "show, don't tell" (meaning use the visual nature of the medium to its best advantage), a similar principle for IF should be "do, don't tell" -- I.e. if anything about the plot or characters can be presented in a way that allows the player to interact with something to uncover the information, that's probably better than just having them read about it.

With that in mind I removed an NPC from Forest, the Historian, and replaced him with a room-sized 3D map of the galaxy which the player can move on four axes: selection of objects, zoom, moving forwards and backwards in time, and changing the information shown. In addition, I was able to design and implement a gesture control system simple enough to require no instruction. This is something you don't get the opportunity to do every day.