Devlog:Working With...Bugs

There's a term in software development called "eating the dogfood" which basically just means using your own product to find out if it's actually edible. As I work through the growing list of demo games in the Working With... section, including Area Scenery, Aspects, Collections, Exits & Doors, Furniture, Locks & Keys, and Nests, each one seems to reveal new bugs, frustrations, and unneccesary complications.

For example, in the locks and keys demo, the name of the start room is "Chamber of Keys", where I found that examine keys in bowl prompted the player to choose from a selection that included the room, simply because the room has "keys" in its name. Obviously, the room should not be included in a list of keys in a bowl, and internal disambiguation should have accounted for that, but that particular situation had just never come up 'til now.

I find that my demos are growing more complex as I go, too, and along the way I have found and fixed a surprising number of esoteric bugs, refactored a number of long standing functions and settings, clarified a few author-facing concepts, added a new widget type, added new verb reactions, and introduced a whole new set of placeholders, all of which resulted in touching hundreds of files.

While I'm happy that the demo games are leading me to improving the engine overall, I realize that making this many changes this frequently is not a sign of stability, and that I am still a long ways away from a releasable product. I like to think that all these changes represent a process of refinement, and not just an endless loop of constant change, and I look forward to the day when I can confidantly release AdventureJS into the wild.