Bogged down, but gotta push through

After around 90 days of work, with 10+ hour days and little to no breaks, I've hit the wall.

For those that don't know what I'm talking about, the wall is when you hit a point where you just don't want to go on anymore - you're bored, or you're burnt out, or what have you. In my case, I'm pretty burnt out and having trouble maintaining my level of self-motivation.

To be expected of course, but the key when you hit the wall in any endeavor is to keep pushing through.

The wall I'm currently struggling through is the Legal system in my current game. It's quite hard to design a gameplay-friendly way for your players Crew to get arrested and charged with things. It's taken quite a lot of brainstorming to get it even close to right, and so I've been basically stalled the last few days as I thought it over and did minor bits of code.

Thankfully, I think I've got most of it nailed down now. This is the last major component (aside from corp/Family stuff and the monetization) that needs to be put into place before I can start testing it.

At some point after this I'm going to start showing bits of it off. I've been reluctant as things have been pretty much in flux, but it's time to start promoting this baby soon.

After I complete the legal system first draft, I have to work on getting my Amazon Machine Image(s) setup - that's right, the game will be hosted on "The Cloud" - which is the ideal way to host an MMO that might be small, big, or anywhere in between.

I'll make sure to post the experiences I have getting AWS to work with my backend.

A couple of good rules of thumb with Flex Builder

When it's being flakey, clean the project. I just had a bug where what the debugger said a class instance was and what it ACTUALLY was were different.

When I cleaned (after having had successfully rebuilt the project and ran it a few times, as well as stepping through the code!) - the compiler then told me there was an error in the code that wouldn't allow it compile. An error in the code that I had just been stepping through.

Nice. Thanks Adobe! You guys ROCK!

Second - and this one bites me in the ass a lot since I am lazy and haven't set up a proper way to enable this in the HTML templates yet - make sure your caching is off when testing your Flex browser app. I occasionally forget to turn this back off and get a really weird bug bite me in the ass before I remember.