After the last project, I said that I’d be trying to write the game script sooner in the process. I was half-right, though I’m not sure which half.

I started by writing down the basic idea of the game—you were a young alien chef in training, trying to make a name for yourself by coming up with the greatest dish ever. I figured you could travel around looking for ingredients and advice, cooking for people to get a sense of what they liked, and sooner or later someone would let slip some bit of information about one might go about creating the greatest dish known to, er, alienkind.

I had the basics. I went to work coding the environment and the NPC models.

Once I had those, I started working on the script, and discovered I hated the idea that I’d just spent the time laying the groundwork for. It was stupid. I wanted something—well, something else. Meaty. Grim. Dead Space-level grim, not primary colors in a sunny sky. Wandering through a dark clutch of scary weeds, bumping into the bodies of people you knew. Sweeeeeet.

After toying with this idea for far too long, I told myself to lighten the fuck up and have some fun. This is always good advice. I’d still lost the time, though, and I still didn’t want to make a game where you went around cooking for people without risk, without a motivation other than ambition. (Ambition is a fine motivation in life, but in stories I find it uninteresting unless it leads characters down darker paths.)

I briefly considered combining the two, and creating a game where you had to go around a dark, scary clutch of weeds and cook for people to stop them from killing you. I still think the sheer stupidity of it would have worked, and I may go back to it someday.

In the meantime, I was tinkering with the code. This isn’t usually a bad thing. It’s a useful process, on occasion—test this, try this out, find alternative methods. However, it’s got to be part of a plan, or the tinkering takes over, and turns into bike-shedding. I lost a significant portion of those three months arguing with myself over what color to paint the weeds (so to speak).

Eventually, I came up with the idea of writing a short farce. (Can’t imagine how.) It still took a couple of rewrites to come up with the idea of a reusable minigame. That one got a big cheer.

In all, I suspect I spent half the time thinking how much I disliked my ideas, then desperately trying to come up with new ideas to dislike. This isn’t going to cut it in future.

For the new project, I’m going to try writing a good bit of the script up front before I start coding. I’ve resisted this because writing doesn’t feel like work—at least, not in the way that coding does. But if it saves me time and tedium, then it’s well worth it.