Dev Diary #10

Hey guys,

Things have been a little slow here recently, due to Crimson finding some other part-time work to do. This is important for us, as anything that keeps us fed and housed keeps Carnal Souls going. So, while this may cause a reduction in pace, it does mean our immediate future is a little more secure now. At least, secure enough that we're not in a permanent state of panic attack any more. It's also in no small part to the amazing support we've gotten from everyone on Patreon. <3

So, the update for that asset I mentioned in the last update got released yesterday, and it looks like it can now do everything we need. The asset is called Dialogical, and is a tool for building branching dialogues and scenes inside Unity.

It has several major advantages over using Twine, as it works similarly but integrates much more directly with Unity (meaning there's no need to spend a long time building and maintaining a Twine importer). The update added the ability to pass parameters, or multiple parameters, with method calls, either when scene nodes are started or when options are selected by the player.

The plain english version is that this means I can create an API (basically, a way for two things to talk to each other) between written text and game data. I can create methods/functions which do a set thing, and then I (or another writer) can use those to check conditions for nodes as well as change things in the game depending on player choices. This should hopefully mean that writers don't need to know special code or anything, just that the method 'IfEyesAre' checks a character's eye colour.

The best part is that this also means we'll be remaining with the original parser/director system for use in writing, on which we've already done a lot of work. 

Aside from that, we've also been looking at possible ways to maintain our weapons and moves databases, so that it doesn't become a nightmare later on. For instance, if you have a steel straightsword with four moves and we maybe introduce later a way for the player to add/remove moves on that weapon, we need a way for the game to know which out of the dozens of moves we have can be applied to it. We don't want daggers with 'Ground Slam' or Wooden Clubs with 'Stab' on them.

We've also been looking closely at how shields will work, so that their stats when equipped make sense and that they behave as expected.

Until next time!