August 13, 1989
Today I finally put in the mouse. I’m glad I did. It’ll probably take another full day to get it perfect, but it’s worth it. People are going to love it. Tomi will be thrilled.
August 14, 1989
Brian is back from vacation.
Put in the last two princess animations today (“Embrace” and “Send”). Only Jaffar, the Grand Vizier, remains.
Oh, and I talked to George. Good things are happening. His Texasville documentary is shooting in two weeks. He wants me to visit him in Texas once it starts.
Virginia called to say she is trying to set up In the Dark for $3 million with her new boss, James Alex. She’s all excited.
August 16, 1989
Full lunar eclipse.
A productive day. Put a disk into QA. Got the Vizier footage I’d shot with Robert over the weekend developed, and put in the Vizier walking. It looks OK. A relief, actually. That was the last thing I’d been wondering if it would be good enough. From now on it’s all downhill. Finishing what I’ve started, cleaning up, fine-tuning.
(Keeping my fingers crossed. No sinister new bugs, please. No disk crashes or corrupted data. Just another seven days of clean work, and a QA signoff at the end of it. Please, no nasty surprises.)
Robert is in deep panic about finishing his game. He did, however, put in a hilarious decapitation sequence this afternoon, in which the C-Generation knocks off your head and it bounces around the room while you stand there, convulsing and headless.
I called Tomi in Paris and told her about the climactic battle with Shadow Man. She was thrilled.
Thank God for this game. It’s the only area in my life where I feel sure that my efforts are doing good, not harm. It’s good, and it’s mine, and thousands of people are going to be glad it exists. How many things can you say that about?
August 19, 1989
Today was brutal. It was just me in the empty building, Saturday from 9 am to 8 pm. Didn’t talk to a soul all day, except Peter LaDeau and a pal of his, briefly.
I must have spent six hours fiddling with those Vizier arm-raising shapes. It was a big mistake thinking I could shoot it without a cape and draw the cape in later. I’d forgotten what a slow and tedious process hand animation is, and how hard it is to get decent results. But it turned out OK, considering.
The main thing is, it’s done. The opening scene with the Vizier and the princess is over. Finito. Now all that’s left is details. Text. Fiddling. I could putter about for days; but whatever changes I want to make, I’d better make before 8 am Monday.
After months of restraint, I’m starting to let myself get excited. This game is hot. It’s going to go over very, very well. If I’m wrong about that, then I don’t know anything and I should get into a different line of work. The only questions in my mind are:
1. how much of an Apple II market is left? And
2. will we be able to get the IBM version out fast enough to cash in?
It’s a great game. It’s the best I can do. After three years of work, I’ve reached the point of diminishing returns. If I had to make it better, I don’t know where I’d start. I’ve given it everything I have. All I can do now is let it go, and hope for the best.
And help Lance get the IBM version done.
And make sure that Mac, Atari and Amiga versions get under way.
And Nintendo, for whatever my efforts are worth.
There’s still a whole page of things to fix. And another round of QA testing. And copy protection. It ain’t over yet.
But it sure is getting close.
August 20, 1989
A full working Sunday, but I didn’t quite finish everything. The creative part is done. What remains now is technical stuff, housecleaning, including the tedious task of cleaning up two more double hi-res digitized text screens. (I got the first one done today.) I’ll try to get the disks into QA before 4 pm tomorrow.
Tomorrow I’ll play the game all the way through a couple of times on the IIc, looking for bugs and trying to get a feel for the whole thing.
August 21, 1989
*sigh* I left work today, tired and burnt out, hoping the disk I was carrying would be The One. I went home, booted it up, and…
Those weird bugs are back. The ones that only show up the very first time you boot the disk, and only on certain machines, and then only sometimes. Obviously there are some zero-page locations that aren’t getting initialized. It looks like $06 (opacity) is one of them. That carries a sinister echo of the bizarre bug that’s been keeping the 3.5″ version from running. In that case, after hours of confusion, Roland and I finally tracked it down to that same location, $06, which contained (I seem to remember) a 42. When I get in tomorrow I’m going to go over that code with a magnifying glass.
Shit.
