Sneak Peek #37

Hey, all! It seems many of you are interested in seeing a portion of the script for upcoming content, so today I'm sharing a PDF of a scene featuring Matt that'll be in the next story update.

This Sneak Peek post is also a look behind the scenes at how I write for a choice-based game. It's certainly a little spoiler-y, but mostly this is just a snippet of how events can play out based on your choices.

The PDF is attached for you to download. This is basically the raw script and may be a little tricky to parse, so here are some things to know!

Setting the Scene

This takes place partway through a hangout at Matt's place, and it's only seen if you reached a certain Hookup Level with him and made certain choices during the first part of the hangout. Essentially, you really turned him on, and this is the result.

Who's Speaking?

Each line in quotes represents a new screen that you'll click through. If the line has a "c" in front of it, the speaker will be shown as Connor; if it's "mt," it'll be Matt. If there is neither a "c" or an "mt," that means the line is your internal monologue.

What Will You See?

The first portion, and some sections later on, are the typical view of a background + character sprites. Starting off, you'll be in Matt's living room, and you'll see expression changes before each new line:

## Connor expression change
show screen c_smiling

Connor has special code for his expression changes. This shows his smiling expression.

show mt smiling

This means Matt's sprite will be smiling, but he's not the one speaking the current line.

mt smiling "dialogue here"

This shows what Matt's expression will be when saying the current line. If there is no expression tag, his expression hasn't changed.

In a few spots, the characters' outfits change. For example, $ outfit_connor = "shirtless" means all his sprites from that point on will be shirtless, just as the tag suggests.

Partway through, the sprites are hidden and replaced with CGs. This shows in the script as a scene description, like this:

scene #description of CG

Variant Dialogue

This will be the trickiest to parse while reading, but I thought some of you would find it interesting to see how I write the different versions of scenes to account for your choices. This is written in a format that makes it easy for me to separate out each variant without getting confused, as well as makes programming it a simpler task.

Primarily you'll see this:

The beginning of a block of variants always starts with "if choice_flag" and ends with "else"; if there are more than two choices, the ones in between start with "elif."

I name the choice flags to be reasonably intuitive, so hopefully it shouldn't be hard to figure out what choice is altering what you see.

Sometimes within each variant scene there are even more variants. Each nested choice is labeled numerically and highlighted a different color so I can keep track of what all I've written. Layer 1 is highlighted in green, layer 2 in blue, and layer 3 in purple, plus other colors for even deeper nesting:

For those curious about why I developed this method—when I paste this into the program I use to code the game, the highlights don't carry over, so they're only for writing. But the starts and ends of each block do show up, like this:

Starting with #1, I select everything between a Start and End, tab it over to the correct place, and then repeat for each nested section:

Okay, I think that's all I need to clarify. The PDF is attached—I think this makes it clear why I'm really eager to get to this part of Matt's story!