Frayed Knights Dev Blog Update

Tales of the Rampant Coyote's Jay Barnson has provided us with a new update for his humor-based indie RPG Frayed Knights.
But there's the problem of practicality. I mean, if you let me go down one side-street, I'll want to go down the next... and the next. I want to keep opening doors and go over the next hill - and all of that has to be pre-generated (or at least randomly generated). It must be scripted. Artwork, animations, and sound has to be created. It has to be tested. Debugged. Tracked. States have to be maintained and saved. There are triggering conditions, and especially in 3D there's only so much detail and objects that you can show on the screen at once before the player's 4-year-old machine blows a gasket.

And that's where I get frustrated as a designer / developer / programmer on Frayed Knights. As you folks know (if you played the pilot), I've fallen victim to these same game-design shortcuts that irritate me as a player. There are doors in the village that are (currently) unusable, areas that block movement without good reason, and stretches of hallways and village road that just take too long to travel without anything interesting happening (I've corrected this somewhat by increasing movement speed by 50% over that in the pilot, but it's still just a crutch).