General Devlog on Where This Game Falls Down

(AKA all the features I wish I had been able/had time to implement)

In general, I am sorry to say that the quality and depth of the writing begins to lag off considerably by the time you get into Year Ten, because by the time I got to that point in the writing, I was already suffering some pretty severe burn-out from Year Nine.  (Which, actually, is pretty appropriate…)  One of the major things that I would like to fix in a later version is to have Menelaos' attitude towards Helen be more mythologically accurate.  In this game, he's sort of like "oh, c'mere, you!" instead of being more like "I'm going to kill you for what you've--oh damn I forgot how hot you are!"  That's something I hope to fix in a later version. 

So, first of all, it would have been great if I'd been able to include every person and group mentioned in the Catalog of Ships in the Iliad.  Since I was under such a deadline, I only went with the ones that seemed most prominent/memorable.  Consequently, some people just sort of "appear" when they're needed, even though they could have been present all along if I'd been thinking ahead.  Having made a rash decision to have ten events each year was also a bad idea:  I needed all sorts of nonsense to fill in the middle years, and ended up having to skip a lot of important events for the last two years, particularly the final year.  (It especially pained me having to leave out the theft of the Palladion!)

I would also have liked to have actual stats for number of troops, amount of food, army morale, etc., which you would then have needed to keep an eye on, but I didn't know how to do that, because I was learning TWINE as I went along.  I did figure it out (to a certain extent) by the time I was somewhere around Year Eight, but I thought it made more sense to finish Year Ten first and then go back and add in things like that, once I had a stable, working version of the complete game.  Only then Years Nine and Ten took so long to write that there was no time to go back and add that stuff in.  (I'm not even sure I managed to find and squash all the bugs in the code!)  I would very much like to do that at some later date, however.  (Possibly switching from TWINE to a more graphics-based program, though that might require me to find an actual programmer to work with, because I don't think I'd be up to the challenge of learning any of the really intense programming languages.)  Generally speaking, I think I'd like to remake this as more of an RPG hybrid, so that instead of sending one guy to all the battles, you're arranging the whole battle party, even if the combat is then automatically generated.  (But that sounds like way more than I would ever be able to program in anything!)  It'd also be nice if whether or not anyone was injured in these battles was dependent on their statistics and levels and stuff rather than a dice roll.  (Admittedly, I changed the number of faces, as it were, to reflect my notion of their skill level, but it's still a very one-dimensional method.)

Another thing that really bothers me is how little the Trojans actually matter in the game.  I had intended to have every battle have a chance of killing or wounding generals on both sides, and ended up with most battles merely having a small chance of wounding whichever Greek general is in the lead.  :(  I blame part of that on how little I understood how to use TWINE, part of that on the basic overambition of the project, and part of it on how few Trojan generals I could actually remember by name.  (Though I did actually create a variable for Glaucos even though I ended up not using it...)

A lot of the early years (like everything pre-year eight) are very sloppy in their coding.  It took me a long time to realize I could do things with variables to get around having to copy-paste huge chunks of text to be able to have different characters do the same actions, so I have a lot of passages that should be only one with a variable or (if:) to personalize it.  Also my crazy number if conditionals may have broken some of the late passages, especially the Nostoi and the fates of the Trojans.  I did the best I could to test everything, but there are so many different combinations that I ran out of time to test all of them.  (Also had trouble remembering which ones I had tested and which I hadn't...)

Dumbest thing ever:  it took me most of the month to remember the word "ephebe" and as soon as I did I started using it where appropriate, but never remembered to go back in and put in earlier passages.  (For those less steeped in Ancient Greek culture, an ephebe is a youth who has hit puberty (around 17-18 at that time) but not yet grown his first beard.  It is sometimes translated as "youth" and other times as "boy," and…let's see, how do I put this without making too broad a generalization?  In the "typical" pederastic relationship, the younger partner would have been an ephebe and the elder would have been a young man who had grown his first beard but likely would not have been married yet.  Men who remained in same-sex relationships past leaving the ephebe years were often mocked (see Aristophanes referring to the tragedian Agathon, for example) for not being as "manly" as society wished.)  Oh, and I may as well also say here that yes, I know the terms "erastes" and "eromenos" and I purposefully did not use them, because each region had its own terms for the roles in pederastic relationships, and those were the Classical-era terms.  We don't know what terms would have been used in the Mycenaean era, and in each region of Greece.  (Since Creon can have three different home towns as well as an unspecified one, that is actually significant here!)  Therefore, I used a generic English approximation, calling the elder the lover and the younger the boyfriend.  Not the best solution, maybe, but…I feel like it worked all right…except sometimes I felt like the situation really kind of asked for the other term and it was frustrating not to use it…

I am thinking of adding a glossary to a later version.  I don't know how much that's needed, though, and welcome comments on any terms or names that people don't know.  (I am especially tempted to do so because in my references to the culture, I refused to use the anachronistic term "Hittite", opting instead to refer to the Land of Hatti, or Hattusa, its capital.  The incident where a new High King was usurped by his uncle really did happen, btw, and the uncle in question moved the capital back to Hattusa (though I'm not sure where it had been before), though this event was significantly earlier than the traditional date assigned to the Trojan War of c. 1184 BCE (which would have them returning home to already destroyed communities, despite that mythology attests to a full generation passing between the Trojan War and the devastation that was the end of the Late Bronze Age).  I was working on a timeline for the Trojan War for a novel series that I'm about to rewrite (and possibly convert into TWINE games) that's set about twenty years later because I had some issues with when I had originally set it, since it had my cast arrive in Babylon in the year of a regnal change, which was really going to muck up everything if I had to try and incorporate it, and when I shifted things backwards a bit to avoid that, I realized I had made the start of the Trojan War coincide with the succession crisis in Hatti, and I thought "what better reason for the Hittites not to notice the war over Troy?"  (Though, really, Memnon was probably originally a Hittite, as early texts refer to Ethiopia as being in the east rather than the south, only then later on the name became associated with a region in Africa, etc.))