The coding for gremlinn's AGL game, currently codenamed POAT (a take-off on GOAT, which is a corruption of the acronym GotA, for "Game of the Ages"), is finished, and now that game, too, is in the testing stages. Because I want this one to come out first, I've shifted my testing efforts over from GOAT to POAT as of last night. So I figured this would be a good time for an update, since not much will change for a couple of weeks. I'm going to get numbers-heavy in this update, because I absolutely love numbers.

GotA is somewhere around the two-thirds mark for testing. I still have quite a bit to go, but some of the most complicated sequences are already tested and look good. Things have been working reasonably on the whole. I've only encountered one "game logic" bug so far that I had to think for a while before I could fix; the rest have been localized bugs like missing variable adjustments, typos, and so on.

I noticed something interesting about the dimensions of the game: the current capacity of the AGL engine (though most parameters can be trivially extended should be need arise) would comfortably accommodate a game approximately twice the size of GotA: it uses 147 locations, out of a possible 300; 98 global variables out of a possible 20; 45 objects out of a possible 100; and 7 enumerated objects out of a possible 20. The current code size, by the way, is 702,648 bytes, with an average location code length of 4779 bytes.

Compare with POAT: 173 locations with 595,478 bytes of code, averaging 3402 bytes per location. It uses around 180 global variables, 78 objects, and 3 enumerated objects.

I'm ecstatic about both games. They're very different from each other in setting and tone, and I think they'll be great fun. That said, GotA was so exhausting, so draining, that I don't know how many more of these I, personally, will want to tackle. I think I want to do one more -- not in the near future -- but that might be it. What I really need to do is write a new game *engine* for some different kinds of games. Suggestions are welcome.