Hi guys,
As the next version is supposed to come out in two-ish weeks, I though I’d make a small progress update.
So basically I didn’t have as much time as I though to work on the game, but overall I’m satisfied with my progress. Dialogs and events are pretty much functional, and even though I might need to improve them a bit in the future, it is completely possible to write entire dialog trees without even having to touch the code of the game itself. For the last two weeks, I have been working exclusively with Powerpoint to design Emma’s dialog tree and Notepad++ to write said dialog tree, only launching Game Maker to test that everything is working as expected.
Here’s how it works : in the gamedata folder, there’s a Dialog file for each character, and an Event file for each room. When the game boots, it will read each Dialog file and merge them into a single document. Same thing for the Event files.
Dialogs and Events are two bricks that can be assembled together. Dialogs are, of course, used to display what a given character has to say, and can be followed by more dialog, a choice or an event. Events are what is guiding a dialog through its branches, by checking whether or not this or that condition has been met, and taking the according dialog branch. Choices are a special kind of event, that allow the player to chose himself which dialog branch to take instead of relying solely on the game’s state.
As an example, here is what Emma’s main dialog branch looks like:
The blue cases are events, either to evaluate the state of the game before chosing a dialog branch, or to modify the state of the game according to the player’s choices. “Activators” are a special kind of event I use to define narrative checkpoints and easily check if a player has met a bunch of condition without having to check for a whole lot of variables: if I want to check if the player has gone through a specific dialog branch, I can activate a checkpoint to signify to the game that the player has indeed done so and use this checkpoint as a condition in other events by checking whether it is activated or not, completed or not.
Choices are the purple cases. They can only follow a dialog, and especially you can’t have two choices back to back. However, they can be followed by another dialog or an event.
Finally, the dialogs are the red cases. Not much to say here… Their only reason to exist is to display a given character’s words.
The grey boxes are other dialog branches. They’re not displayed here because I’m not completely done with them yet and they’re taking a lot of space, so I put them on separate documents for clarity. But I may post them along with the next version so that you guys can test the whole dialog tree.
This dialog tree I am working on is only for one character in one location. Emma will have a lot more things to say in the future as I add more content. I even have a couple ideas of events to give the player a chance to sway her to the abyss of fat and weight gain appreciation for example… And I’ve already started to prepare the scene in this dialog tree. Also, the consequences of your actions will have multiple scopes: some things will only affect your active character, but some other things will carry on between your different save files.
Right now, I have to finish the dialog tree and introduce food preferences and gifts. Unless the universe decides to screw me really hard, I think I can do that in two weeks.
Once I’m done with this update, I’ll focus on the sprites, because now that I’m starting to introduce NPC related mechanics I really want the sprites to be done quickly. So I’ll finish the character’s large sprites and start working on clothes. I also want to introduce a new NPC, keep working on the dialogs, and add a few more places and game mechanics.
