Day 293: No Nano

Lately I haven't been hewing to my 'one hour per day' quota. At all. Whatsoever. And suddenly, hey, it's November and I'm looking at two months until my deadline for releasing this wacky thing. November is, as I've alluded to before, National Novel Writing Month, and I've wanted to participate this year.

THAT ISN'T HAPPENING!

Instead, I'm dedicating my NaNo time to working on this game - an hour and a half per day, every day. My goal is to actually finish everything by the end of the month, giving me a month to hand over the beta to people and watch as they rain bug reports upon my poor undefended soul.

I started a day early - I began phase 1 of my XML overhauls quite a while back. I was suffering from "arrow XML", which looked a lot like this:

<object>
  <child name="foo">
    <other_object>
      <child name="bar">
        <yet_another_object/>
      </child>
    </other_object>
  </child>
</object>

Now imagine it nested about twenty levels deep.

It seemed like it'd be fairly straightforward to write each object out one by one and then just refer to them by ID, but - as it turned out - it wasn't. Changing the way my parser worked exposed some deep bugs in the system that I hadn't seen before, and I was forced to quash them!

Now, however, it works. Thus, National Game Finishing Month begins!