When we last checked in with Goldenflame Dragon, he had begun working on the Great Abyss…this after refactoring the in-game maps to make them fit on a single screen.

Throughout November, when he wasn’t busy with his NaNoWriMo project, he worked on the game’s map editor and managed to squash a bug that had long plagued him therein, and was soon able to finish the map for the Great Abyss itself. As the month progressed, he added some special functionality to the Abyss, including the removal of players’ ability to use certain commands.

By mid-month, Goldenflame had technically finished the Abyss, including all of the needed code changes; what followed was play-testing…and a post-Thanksgiving computer outage that proved to be a power supply issue.

And, as of yesterday, he was ready to call work on the Abyss done…or, almost done, at any rate:

I think I got the Abyss working! (There’s a sentence.) One last thing that I need to test, but it’s late and I’ll do it tomorrow, but at the last gasp of consciousness tonight I figured out and fixed one pernicious bug that was preventing the last sequence from firing properly.

One little caveat:

In the process… ok, I am not going to go deep enough into the weeds to really explain this, but there’s a chain of events that the code goes through when the player does something and their turn it supposed to end. Sometimes, an action that usually ends the turn I want to have it not do that, so I have to write a special signal that says “don’t end the turn here.” Thing is, what receives that signal varies, so I keep having to add ways to prevent the turn from ending in various places. Tonight, I thought of a much more elegant way to handle the whole situation… which I don’t want to implement now, because I don’t want to rewrite all these things that are already working, and I don’t want two completely different solutions in the codebase at the same time because that way lies annoying debugging later when something goes wrong and I don’t even know which path it’s using, and there aren’t going to be many more of these that I need to add, at this late stage. So I’m just salty that I thought of a better way now that it’s basically too late to use it. But I’ll file it away for next time.

As of today, however, Goldenflame is much more confident that the Abyss is, at last, finished:

I finished the Abyss! The last bugs were stomped, and now you can gain the ability to cast high level spells. I’m very happy about the feeling of forward progress this gave me.

As usual, you’d be well-advised to follow The Dark Unknown on Facebook for up-to-the-minute updates about progress being made on the game’s development.