Dev Log 3

2018-Aug-04, Saturday 11:04 am
felicitygs: a smiling shark with a lazer on its back. it slaps its fins and makes a heart. (Default)
Made a fair bit of progress yesterday! I'm really pleased, and feel a bit more clear on some stuff I'll need to do. It's also getting pretty obvious this is going to be a fairly big project, but I guess I kind of expected that since it's a game and all. Let's do a quick run down on the newest changes. 

change log
  • made branchstart and branchend tags--will I keep using these? not sure. Might be better to just make tags for particular subplots/plot points.
  • finished the cousin related start branches
  • completed the initial start sequence, dumped player back to docks for a partial day 1
 
to do
  • set up season based weather stuff; at the least get the docks spring stuff set up for first month
  • decide how to divide up/progress in game time -- quarters, hours? 
  • how does fishing work? decide mechanics later, get a prototype in for now that links from docks
  • set up an inventory and buy/sell for the fish catches (maybe not right away.... systems later, story first)
  • decide a basic framework for the mc traits and relationships
learned
  • twine does NOT tab indent displayed text, even when it's been tabbed 
  • right that 'start here' thing exists i should like uh use it for testing instead of tediously looping through the whole thing right good job TESTING IS HARD OK SHHHHHHHHHHHHHH shhhhhhhhhhhhhh
  • can set booleans by just typing (set: x to true) no quotes on true/false nice
 I'm not sure if I'll keep doing daily dev logs, but I have a feeling that these are going to be super useful down the road, especially since I'll probably end up taking a break at some point. Summer break is about to start, so I'll have about 3 weeks to try and finish up as much as I can before those breaks will get pretty inevitable.

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Dev Log 2

2018-Aug-03, Friday 02:51 pm
felicitygs: a smiling shark with a lazer on its back. it slaps its fins and makes a heart. (Default)
 

I feel like I've barely started writing a first draft of the game script, and I'm not even through the initial start scripting. Let's go through a couple things I'm doing here.

The game starts fairly linearly, with a couple minor branches that should allow for some character building. The main character/player is going to need to have some variables for stats--but this early, I'm not entirely sure what stats I want to be tracking. I'll get there eventually. This is mostly a prototype for a game I'm going to be building in RPG maker, so the access to a database there should make stat mods much easier to track versus Twine.

I am going to need to flesh out several villagers--right now the only one I have a strong feel for is Cousin (name pending change?), and that's mostly because he's probably my favourite outside of the MC. Either way, I'll get there eventually--for right now, the focus is just on getting the initial systems set up.

You can also already see the various different game locations. Right now, I'm going with a basic if (start != true), then (execute start scripting), and putting all the post start stuff in an else statement. I suspect that these are going to get messy--I need to figure out how to track days/time, as well as the seasons. I suspect each else is going to have nested seasons inside as well, or certain areas will be entirely locked off during particular seasons. It would be nice to have a calendar the player can check as well--I might stick one in the mc's house, actually. That would make sense.

Stuff I learned about Twine 
  • if I decide to change what engine I'm using, that's relatively painless other than all the rewriting. Might be necessary, though--the only inventory thing I've found uses sugarcube and would need rewriting for harlowe, which is what I'm using. Anyway, that's in the main menu when the story is open.
  • the main menu also contains the area to mess with the javascript behind the scenes, so I should have access to javascript objects--objects might make the characters much easier.
 

 
To Do
  • add some comments about where potential stat changes will be
  • finish up the initial outline for the start of the game
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Dev Log 1 - Twine

2018-Aug-02, Thursday 01:45 pm
felicitygs: a smiling shark with a lazer on its back. it slaps its fins and makes a heart. (Default)
So I've started working on putting together the rough script for my game in Twine. I figure I should be able to at the very least prototype it, and it'll give me an idea of all the different resources I'm going to need to make for the final thing. 

But I don't know Twine at all! So I got started the old fashioned way, namely jumping right in and following along with a fairly simple tutorial for a bog standard basic RPG. 
 
 

Not anything super impressive, to be honest, but it sure taught me a fair bit. Here's some of the stuff I should try not to forget:
  • most commands need to be in (parens) in order to work.
  • [ ] is for encapsulating if and else statements!!!! 
  • on that note, you don't need anything for displaying test. You just type it.
  • strings can be in either single or double quotes it seems
  • (display: "scene_name") is great for doing initialization and then kicking the user to the proper screen unnoticed
  • $ is for global variables, _ is for card specific ones
Supposedly there's a way to make objects with Javascript, which would sure make creating the different characters a heck of a lot easier. I'd like to have some sort of access to friendships and moods without needing to type the same shit over and over for every single villager. I'll have to look into that some more.

All those people who are like 'twine isn't programming!!!' sure are full of shit though. Basically everything I've done is programming--super simply, yes, and far more transparent that some languages, but this is definitely a programming language.

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