Travelogue 3/12, March thoughts

Today is the 91st day of the year. Meaning, it’s also the 91st level I’ve designed for this project. If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s to number the days. Not that it’s especially useful, but it gives me the illusion of a better understanding of time. And I can brag about it. Every single day.

I could also identify days by their internal level name. Today is _17_275_04-01_6.

Wondering why April Fools’ level includes a fish? It’s an April 1st custom in some French-speaking countries. People stick paper fishes to each other’s back (kids, mostly).

Let’s break this down.

The underscore is for sorting purpose. In RPG in a Box, it’s sorted after numbers, so it makes sure levels are added after my daily templates. Because yes, I have one template per day, with a default entrance and a default exit, and a specific colored lighting setting.

17 is for the year, obviously. I don’t intend to increase this number, or at least, not within the current application, since it could go on until I die and clutter the project’s tree accordingly, knowing it already takes quite a while to navigate. But it allows me to sort my “official” levels before the ones I made in 2016 for testing purposes. And it reminds me which year it is.

275 is a countdown. It decrements every day, and allows me to keep the newest level on top of the others. I’ve never told anyone “today is 275th remaining day before the end of my project”, but I could try, just for fun.

04 is the month, I guess you’ve figured this out. And 01 is the day, of course. Note the 0 before the 1, to sort this after 10, 20 and so on.

And 6 is the day of the week, which matches the number of its template. 6 is for Saturday. 6 is for purple, with a gradient to Sunday’s pink. Yes, in case you didn’t notice, I use 7 color templates that never change, and the levels cycle between them. So you can tell the day a level was made by its color.

Currently, the game has been downloaded 9300 times, which seems insanely huge to me. At the end of February, we were at around 5800, which means it was downloaded 3500 times in March. Not bad.

If you haven’t played the game yet, it’s here: