Harakiri Game Progress

Hello, there!  As I've written last week, I am going to keep the posts about my recent project, "Harakiri", up to date.  Here's what happened.

First, I've completed writing all the texts for the game.  Not that there were too many to begin with, mostly the help instructions at the beginning, but still this is now done anyways.  This doesn't include building up vocabulary, right now it is less than 30 words, but I'll be expanding it during the week ahead.

Second, I've spent some time figuring out how my program should work.  Here's the draft I drew outlining the whole game logics:

This seemingly primitive drawing has helped me a lot while coding the "skeleton" of the game.  In fact my understanding is that it only thanks to this drawing the actual initial coding is now complete.  Yes, you are not mistaken, neither am I:  the initial code for the game is done already!  And this brings us to...

Third, the "top-to-bottom" approach has shown its advantages to me.  I've finished coding the outline (or the "skeleton") of the game, and now it's time to work on the details.  And that's the beauty and power of it:  you don't have to bury yourself under all the details right away, you can go as "deep" as you want at almost any time during the project lifespan.

There are a lot of things to be done, though.  I haven't touched any graphics yet, all I did was figuring out some very basic layout for the game screens.  I didn't record any music or sounds for the game too.  I also need to extend the dictionary.  All of that is a lot of work, but I hope to finish it all by the end of the week (I remember saying so last week!), and will surely keep the blog updated on that.