0.5.0 WIP - Improve Scripting Workflow

We have the animated CGs for next build, art, story, coding and everything else but the last bottleneck is scripting our scenes. There's 24 new scenes for the next build with some scripts having just a few dozen lines but some having over 100 lines. I decided to take a moment to reflect on how we can improve the scripting experience for myself and our scripters.

A typical visual novel may not use positioning and posing of characters. Few use modular face pieces for mouth, eyes, eyebrows and busom movements and fewer still use camera positioning & zoom. We use all these in Life in Woodchester so we need to be as efficient as possible to keep the content rollout.

We've also established a great way of indicating the speaking character, by moving the speaking character slightly as if they're "speaking up" or driving emotional actions. However all of this means constantly tweaking a characters movement, sometimes several characters and sometimes more than once every single line.

Believe it or not all 24 scenes for this build are in the game in their basic form but they're not perfect. To me every scene should feel satisfying, with characters reacting to other characters and the game clearly showing who the speaker is and driving the emotion further with subtle movements and poses.

I decided to list out some of the areas we can improve on so I can create custom scripts that help address them and speed us up now and well into the future.

Scripting Improvement Breakdown

Flipping Characters requires 2 lines, a flip and X repositioning

• This seemingly minor thing happens often, so I'm going to add the offset_x values into the current scripts for the girls, and also make one for our protag.

Chest movements need animated Manually every line

• For now this will have to keep happening due to time constraints. In the future however we can look into actual mesh physics for the chests that are controlled with spring physics. That would make it automatic.

Camera movements & zoom values are often forgotten and need fished from other lines

• I'm going to make a script for storing 5 camera positions, this way jumping to a camera can be as easy as scrSetCamera(1). No more memorizing camera positions or copy pasting.

Changing a small feature like brows or eyes can become a copy paste game where you fish from other lines.

• Currently everyone has to copy paste previous lines for brows, eyes mouth and sometimes those can be lines away. Making a simple script that allows for changes for all 3 while defaulting to previous means much quicker tweaks to a single face part.

Modifying Positions need fished from other lines

• The solution here is to create a few scripts like scrCharSubtleMove1 that grabs a characters current position and rotation, shifts it slightly to help show this character is speaking.

Making these scripts should only take less than a day or so but the overall time it will save will be compounding. Sometimes you're so busy moving forward you forget about efficiencies like these so I'm glad I could take some time to look into them.

Thanks again, everyone has been very encouraging despite the delays so very thankful you guys are understanding!

Best,

DirtySock