The eleventh day had two commits. After the rush of the week before, I did not build anything. I made lists.
What every game has
In the afternoon I put a new file in the project: a to-do list, sorted from urgent to low. It held my game up against what players expect from any game. Thirty things were already there: the jump, the footsteps on each kind of ground, the map, the compass, the controller, the pause menu. Twenty-four were not. A button to quit. Fullscreen. A slider for the field of view. Subtitles. Keys you can change. A way to save in the middle of a run and come back to it.
None of these is exciting. Nobody tells a friend about the invert Y option. But you notice at once when a game does not have them, and you stop trusting it a little. I wanted the testers to trust it.
Nine wishes
Then, at one in the morning, I wrote a much longer message. It was not a list of what is missing. It was a list of what I wished for, nine of them, typed as fast as I thought them.
I wished the sound and the music were made in code, by the AI itself, so that the game does not lean on anyone else's files. The hands needed round spheres for knuckles, "to be more normal". There should be a book of spells, all of them kind:
All non offensive. Destroy tree should be removed.
Tab would open the spellbook, the number keys would cast, and flying would be a spell too. Escape would open settings with sections, like every game. The right mouse button would offer what you can do with the thing in front of you, and a chair could be picked up and moved, and stay where you left it. Enter would open a chat with whoever is in the same world. At home you could dress your wizard. You could see the other players' hands move. And the last one, the one that made me smile: if you walk into a candle, it should roll a few metres and go out.
A quiet start
Reading it again, I hear someone who had just given the game to friends and was starting to see it through their eyes. The door hunt was there. Now I wanted the small life around it: a chat, a hat, a candle that rolls.
I did not start any of it that night. I wrote it down and went to sleep. The next day would be different.