Sorry for the essay lol. This is more for me than you ;)

I made it 30 days. Hooray! Thanks to fellow streakers for all the motivation, @Nico for creating this streak, and especially @leafo for a really brilliant idea to help channel creativity.

I have decided to create a schedule going forward of what it will look like to work on a game long term.

• 30 days of every day updates
• one day of reflection
• break until monday, wherever that 30 days ends

In 30 days I definitely experienced some good days and some bad days. There were days that I felt like giving up, and days that I just could not muster any sort of creative energy to look at my code. But I always had in my mind: "I have to make an update to the streak no matter what". I can't say those days were very productive, but I found that almost every bad day was IMMEDIATELY followed by a very productive day in which I accomplished a lot more than I had intended. There is definitely a value in being persistent.

In 30 days, here is a rough outline of the progress I made on a game that I've essentially been sitting on in 2 years

1. Story
   1. Narrowed down the world the game takes place in a little better
   2. Changed the location of Act 1 and came up with both gameplay ideas and story that fit
   3. I've written some of the opening dialog
2. Graphics
   1. Widened the view area so that the game works better in widescreen
   2. Built a smoother more engaging camera system
   3. Completed the switch from pygame (software sdl rendering) to sfml (hardware opengl rendering) for a much smoother feel and better framerate
3. Gameplay
   1. Added picking up and dropping objects
   2. Added interacting with objects in the world
      1. Putting up and tearing down a tent that you can only go in when it's up
      2. Setting traps that stop npcs who cross its path
   3. The ability to run, which uses a slowly refilling endurance bar
   4. Enemies who you can hide from or animals who are afraid of you and run away
   5. Still not sure the direction the gameplay will head, but I know it will be some mix of stealth, story, and timing
4. AI
   1. A conversation system that will be used in:
      
      1. Gameplay: Spying on conversations others are having, making story branch choices, or just getting info from people
      2. Cutscenes: Conversations are robust enough to handle most potential cutscene needs
   2. Created some interesting new ai states
      1. A "chase" state that follows somebody as long as they can be seen, with some memory when the object moves out of view
      2. A "flee" state
         
   3. Used existing behavior tree system to start integrating the different AI states into a single type. All npc currently use the SAME behavior tree now, where before an npc that runs away used it's own tree. Now they choose the right branches in the tree according to their state
   4. Perfected pathfinding, even around a dynamically changing environment
      1. HAHAHA. Just kidding. I did make a lot of progress on pathfinding though.
         

All in all, I call this a HUGE success. But it's not all rosy. There are some areas, namely in content creation, that are very sorely lacking. The engine work can be done anytime, but without direction in the way of locking down gameplay and story, the project can't really progress. I'm considering taking the engine as is and making a simpler game with it before coming back to this project. I've been playing a lot of Dragon Quest and Final fantasy and it might be really fun to make something more like that, using all of my own art and just being cheesy. Then again, I've come this far - how much more do I really need to do? I'm not even sure, because I don't have a clear idea in my head of what it looks like. I would really like to get some clear direction so I can start making my own art or find an artist, which would make me more comfortable sharing the game outside of the streak. (ScreenshotSaturday for instance) I really think Erik the Errand Boy could go far, but how to get from where I am to where I want to go still looks like a tough mountain to climb. We'll see.

Break begins now, back to work Monday!