I think I said that everything is now joined-up, even if many of the areas are crude black and white sketches. It's definitely helped me realise where there are issues however.

My dislike of too much chatter apparently didn't make it to my game design. The first five things you do in this game are talk to people. I don't know how I let this happen.

Anyway, I decided I had to insert a mini-puzzle early in the game, so that it's not all talk. Also, this puzzle establishes Edda's fears, one of her key inventory items and sets her up as an antagonist to the town authorities. This was a bit of a happy accident, but I will pretend I'm really clever and it was always going to be that way.

One fun part of my mini-puzzle is I had to remind myself how to change Edda's graphic so that she is carrying an item that lights her way. It's really easy, but now I've done that, I can picture it being really helpful later in the game when she goes into a very, very dark place.

I've been playing Unavowed. It's excellent. I used to avoid these games because I thought they would intimidate me when making my own adventure game. It's actually fine - I know I can't do what they do, but I also get ideas about how to make a game nicer to play. You just see design touches that make the user experience better - I'm trying to incorporate this playability to mine.

My current idea is that the game is one-click for everything. So you click on a thing, and what happens is determined by what it is. So a person - you'd talk to them; a door - you'd walk through it. I guess I got tired of writing code for every time a character looked at a door and said "it's a door." 

I suppose I might discover later that an item needs interact and look options, but I can programme it so that first time you click you look and second time onwards you interact. So it really seems like the way forward.