Debu Complex : a tamagotchi-like game - 24/12/30 | I LIVED BITCH (version 0.9.4)

hey guys uh i got a problem with npc interactions, no bug but i cannot find the right way to start a relationship with jenny or emma nor can i get them to chat with me
could anyone explain what to hand them or when to do anything

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Damn, is this game back? This is the best day of my life.

— key

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Basically, you want to talk to them for a couple days first, this will build up friendship. At some point they’ll let you gift them stuff ; Emma loves anything chocolate, and Jenny just likes booze, but only when she’s in the nightclub. Keep interacting with them and you’ll eventually get to invite them. The other NPCs don’t have a dialogue tree yet, sadly, but I’ll give them some attention someday.

I’m afraid it’s on hiatus again due to Monster Hunter :pensive:

Yeah, I’m working on this again, but the next update may take a while. I have a LOT of sprites to make.

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Sorry hadn’t checked this site, here you go. Only other thing I guess worth mentioning is well before this I did mess with Jenny.json in the main game install/Schedules a while before in a vain attempt to see if I could get her to spawn (just changing some values in the existing blocks). But it just didn’t do anything afaict and I did replace it with a backup of original a while before this issue, the normal progression was also after that so sort of doubt it would be related. You’d know better than me though.

npc.7z (2.2 KB)

I think today is a good day for a quick progress report!

So, as I mentioned earlier before being kidnapped by the Hunter’s Guild to hunt an Arkveld, the migration to the LTS version of Game Maker Studio went reasonably well. I had a bit of a fright at first because the initial loading time started taking way too long, windows exceptions started popping out of nowhere when loading certain saves (but not all of them), and there was nothing in the debug logs to help me figure out what was happening… But after digging sufficiently deep it was actually a very easy fix, so all is well now. The only somewhat notable difference is a dip in performances, though it’s not really significant. On my mid-end computer, I dropped from ~800fps to ~500fps (Anything above the fps target only means ā€œyeah you’re good broā€ in Game Maker language), so I’m not too concerned.

I started implementing the new palette swap solution as well. It’s a LOT more work than I expected because I need to make a small change to all of the several hundred of sprites that can be color-swapped, but it should be worth it. I ended up choosing Pixelated Pope’s Retro Palette Swapper, mostly because it looks like it’ll be flexible enough to easily integrate with the customization tools. Now, with this new solution, palettes aren’t an array of numbers in a json file, but instead are tiny sprites such as this: pHair

This sprite contains all the colors the character’s hairs can take. One palette corresponds to a one-pixel column, the engine will find the pixels that needs to be swapped based on the first column and replace them with the corresponding ones in the appropriate column. This means if you want to add a new color palette, all you have to do is increase the horizontal size of the sprite by one pixel and add your new colors. It also means we are not limited to 7 swappable colors anymore, if I add one row I can define one more color to be checked by the engine. There’s a limit to how many colors we can add this way, it can end up pumping a bit of resources if we start getting a bit too crazy. But for pixel art, it should be fine. I’m not entirely done yet, but it’s going well!

Also I haven’t forgotten your problem Anonynonss, but I need to finish the palette swap first. Right now it breaks the dialogue system because it’s half-implemented and the character display crashes a bit, so I can’t debug anything dialogue/event related… But as soon as I’m done with it I’m checking your saves.

And that’s all for me today!

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Love this project, looking forward to future development!

Welcome back! Good to see you.

No need to worry, appreciate the update though. Happy hunting m8