I've been working on Stage III for three months now; this is a good dividing point as I am three months from alpha and six months from final. The time has come to take a deep breath and review my position.
All in all, I am ahead of where I intended to be, but behind where I should be. The more I learn about this project, the more I realize that more features are necessary than I earlier contemplated. A major task facing me now is to decide exactly what can and should be attempted in the time remaining. Let's start, then, with a random listing of remaining work:
Faces: expression editor, arbitrary support file reading, final face burn, final disentanglement of display code from editor code.
DecisionMaker: verify macros and substitutes, insert/outsert/replace capability.
ScreenTest: verify that it works
Rehearsal: completely new design needed here
StoryEngine: mood processing, lies and secrets, creation and programming of special functions, disentanglement for consumer version, user interface, poison processing.
Backgrounds for story engine display
Help facilities
Performance optimization