Merry Christmas! Here's a mid-week update, though I may still do some more before the weekend. See how it goes.
I wrote out the first combat encounter (not everything shown here, not enough room), and outlined a little after that. My brain went "hey, let's think about when this needs to start getting weirder, like your original story idea" and also that soon I should bust out the ol index cards and do a big plot outline. (So far I've been doing what's known in the writing world as 'pantsing'.)
I used a couple of new code tools this time; a return/respawn function on the game over boxes (gobackto) which I hope if I've done it right will also reset all the counters taking place during the combat, and a couple pieces of dialogue that react to how many times the player has been "casual" or "strict" with their marine jargon while on the comms with the commanding officer.
This is a big project! I'm trying to gauge how long it ought to take me to get a first act done so I can make a preview download, and also how long I should be working on the whole game. A full novel draft usually takes me a year; I expect The Dive to be considerably shorter than that, but we'll see how much it balloons beyond what I first expect.
Enjoy your Christmases, everybody.