An Episode per Chapter

This was originally going to be the first chapter, but having each chapter tied to an episode seems like the more natural way of presenting this material. For that reason this is a separate introduction section. Each chapter of this book will cover the corresponding episode of the game. Unlike the first book, the episode is not going to be developed from start to finish in the chapter. As much of the material that goes into an episode is the same, and assembling an episode into a finished applet is fairly straightforward, chapters will instead focus on the more unique aspects of each episode. Every chapter will start with a strategy guide for the episode followed by a look at the design considerations that went into the creation of the episode and finally a look at the more unique aspects of the episode.

You may wonder why I would start the chapter off with a strategy guide. When you get right down to it, for adventure games the design document for a game is really an extended strategy guide. After all, before you can implement a puzzle, you need to know what that puzzle is and how it will work. As I was planning to create a strategy guide for One of those Weeks anyway, so having the chapter start off with a strategy guide is a bonus.

Once the design for an episode is complete, it needs to be implemented. Most books would just show you how they implemented the design. This works, but programming is a very flexible in it’s nature. There are almost always more than one way to solve a programming problem. For that reason, I will take the extra time to look at what the particular problems an episode needs to solve and try to suggest alternate ways to solve the problem. Explaining why I went the route I did can be more important than knowing what I did.

Theory is nice, but theory alone doesn’t produce anything. That is why the chapter will conclude with the details about how the particular problems for that episode were implemented. If you are unsure of how you would assemble the rest of the episode being discussed, then I would recommend reading the first volume of this series which is available for free at www.BlazingGames.com.