A short update for this week.

So, sleep hygiene degraded last week, and general practices I normally keep around managing the day - I’ve been really enjoying the work I’ve been doing, and the potential inherent in the experience I’ve been putting together. But that’s caused a slip in approach that harms, not helps productivity. I spent some time over the weekend thinking about the focus for this week, and I’m going to complete the combat part of the experience and make that a satisfying slice of content.

It turns out as well that I’m not behind on Art of Game Design - so I’ll be looking to finish that this week, along with reading The English Language.

I’m also going to be very conscious of how I start the day, and making sure that I cleave to my normal way of starting the day rather than rolling out of bed and trying to hit the keyboard straight away. I’ll be starting the morning with the usual routines of:

• waking up housework / typing up notes from the previous day
• breakfast + study
• and making sure there’s a mental buffer of a shower before starting work

I did some thinking around the process of implementation, and how the points where I lost the most time last week were when I was trying to get around processes. So the sensible approach to new functionality (without going overboard) looks like this currently:

1. Implement changes to conversational model - new intent, utterances + annotation set tests
2. Implement basic Lambda function changes - create and register a simple IntentHandler, along with basic unit test verifying execution
3. Implement functionality in Python classes with accompanying unit tests
4. Implement full Lambda function logic plus additional unit tests

I’ve also put together a public Trello board tracking the status of what I’m working on for this week. I’m not planning to implement voice acting for this prototype, but I will put together a full script spreadsheet if time permits, to see what sort of word count a basic experience like this produces, and also to identify component phrases, and start to look at the impact of considering variables like emotional state. (for example, a status report when the ship has sustained critical damage is very different to when the ship is undamaged, in terms of tone)

That’s the stuff that seems important for the moment. Talk more soon!