- Tech support for one of my mom's lady friends. In repayment, I was treated to one of my favorite places to eat out, Baja Fresh.
- Alpha Protocol, finished. There's one major distraction out of the way. I'm a sucker for a good FPS/RPG, and Alpha Protocol is a lot better than its reputation as a bug-ridden game suggests. A pity there will be no sequel.
- The first 54 episodes of Shugo Chara were watched. The first 51 episodes pulled a "decent" rank from me - there were a few interesting plot twists along the way that redeemed what was otherwise a fairly tame magical girl kids anime. From what I've seen of the second set of 51 episodes (which has thus far been two clip shows of plot exhibition and one real episode) they've subtly gone back to the drawing board and refined several aspects of it, which likely will produce a better result.
- I burnt about 2000 calories on my PC Gamer Bike Mini as I watched my anime. Watching anime may be a bad habit, but a cultivated habit of exercising while watching anime may prove a godsend. Physical fitness, I've found, is vital to motivation - much of my heavier bulk of work on BYOND was done when I was 20 pounds less bulky. I'm working on getting back there and, even in the present, the heightened metabolism from the activity seems to help.
Perhaps the foremost example being the Heroes Of Might And Magic series or King's Bounty series or Disciples series, which are roughly operating on the same formula. In these games, the players control heroes who gather troops from various locations on the game map and employ these troops to battle each other or capture vital points in turn-based combat.
That's not quite what I want to do. Partly because I want to do something different and partly because I want it to immerse the player more into the game world. However, the model does at least indicate an interesting way I could manage between-battle resource flow, the whole "consistent virtual world" thing which I think is so important.
It's time to stop incubating and start doing. The plan is to draw up a relatively complete design document this week, one that at least captures the major parts of the game flow and major variables involved, as it has been my experience that coding before isolating these specifics is setting myself up for failure.