Day 160: 2006 is the year of the exploding hard drive

It's pretty tough to keep coding and producing and such, without having hard drives burst into flames on your every other month. But this year beats all the odds. One of my 120gb drive has exploded, this one pretty much literally. It started to smell like burning plastic and then, obviously, died. It's tough to calculate the odds of having so many hard drive crashes in such a small time window. I feel like I'm spending more time backing up data than anything else. Nothing on that drive was related to the project, it was the receptacle for all my bittorrent and shareaza activity. So it's no huge loss. Still, it'll take weeks to recover, and there will always be a haunting feeling that there was something critical on there that I am forgetting about.

But this blog is about the project. Combination of the level segments is complete. It took several days but now the game can move seamlessly from segment to segment. That was the last huge step towards completing the prototype. Here's a small list of things to do before the prototype is complete :

- The 2D cinematic scripting language/segments.
- The loading screens/progress bar (which may be integrated with the 2D cinematic. Load while they read).
- Everything GUI (like the player's life left).
- Handling the life and death of the player.
- Scoring

The rest is mopping up the code, making sure everything is clean and tidy. Almost half of my vacation time is gone and I can't say I'm very confident in achieving my completed 1 level prototype before the end. If I can get rid of outside distractions, it is still feasible.