Dev Diary #1

If you're very quick you'll have already seen today's update on the site. I'lll reiterate the first part and say thank you guys so much. All your support has been absolutely wonderful and means the world to us. Thank you. <3

The part of the update concerning Patreon means that we'll be trying to post small updates every few days here, at least once a week, along with any new art assets or other previews. We hope this will serve as a small thanks to all you wonderful lovely people that have been funding us.

So, firstly, today we've been looking at potentially using Twine 2/Harlowe to create our scenes. This has some pros and some cons. It saves us a large chunk of time in terms of getting us ready for written content, but also means making some sacrifices as far as our Director system is concerned.

In Twine, the Director would be essentially just be code without any shorthand custom interface. Still possible to achieve the things it was meant to, just in more cumbersome ways. However, Twine would be a very large time-saver in that it makes writing complex branching scenes rather simple, as well as providing a format we can import right into the game. It would still need some custom work there inside the game, especially for complex tags like indefinite articles and pluralisation, but it's also free and open-source, and seems like a lot more people are becoming proficient with it. I'll be looking at it more closely tomorrow and drafting up a test scene to see how well it can work for us.

Crimson has been doing some cleanup on the navigation and map system today and tightened up the code a bunch. We've talked at length about how best to represent enemy spawns inside Tiled which both makes it simple and flexible, and allows for specifying certain times of day when things can spawn (or more/less frequently spawn). We have a good idea on how to proceed there. Tomorrow he'll be working on the battle screen/system itself and getting the inner workings of that up and running.

The key thing we have to balance at the moment is that we can only make a game or a story at one time. The game's systems can exist almost entirely without any need for a parser, and the parser needs only a character and scenes to work, but both represent a significant time investment. We can focus entirely on the parser, but it will mean that for a while all we'll have is essentially a choose-your-own-adventure with multiple scenes in it - no game, navigation, battles, pictures; only a box for text and some buttons. Whereas if we focus on the game, we'll actually have a playable game, just without written content for a while. I've decided we should go with the latter.

That being said, if Twine works out, I can very easily provide previews here to you guys which you can click on and then play through the scenes, albeit either basic versions or versions where tags don't quite work since there's no character information behind them.  Still, it should provide a decent look at what's being written for content, so I'll keep you posted on that.

Well, that's our first Dev Diary. See you all again in a few days. :)