fel dreams

 Woops, I forgot to do this right away, so there's probably some stuff I missed! But I do write notes, so hopefully I'll get most of it.

Completed

• Added a sixth time period (noon) and adjusted the code in all the relevant locations.
• decided which locations allow for foraging
• set up the barebones of foraging for the north mountains
• added connectors to the south beach proper
• added a proper connection from town to home
• resolved fishing so that it sends the player back to town properly and cancels fishing for the day
• added the startup tag to the init passage; this makes it run every time AND gets rid of the initial white space for the starting passage >:3

Learned

• About the startup tag! Stick this on any passage you want to run when the game launches; it runs the passages in order, and then kicks to whatever is set in the project as the starting passage. Super cool
• With all that in mind, will probably not actually build the systems proper for now, and keep the twine prototype with just barebones systems. It is, after all, meant to be a reference.

To Do

• decide how to pass/update time. When do I want to do that? the end of day or beginning? How do I resolve things if the player decides to them at night?
• Likewise, how do I want to update time for the twine prototype? Might just be a manual update, which is how I set up the fishing for now.
• add in forage basics for the south beach and for grazing fields.

RPG Maker vs haxeFlixel

I did some digging around the two different programs I'm considering. haxeFlixel is a game framework. It uses ActionScript 3 as the base, so there's lots of resources both on the basic as3 stuff as well as for haxeflixel itself. It seems fairly small, but it's an open source framework and looks, at a glance, fairly easy to work with. It would give me a lot of room for customization, and looking through material, it seems to do pretty well with assigning sprites and stuff. Plus there are tutorials and resources on how to import/make sprite sheets and such. As I know ultimately I want this to be a game in a similar style to stardew as far as looks, with a Jotun touch, that's nice. It is a newerish framework though, and pretty small community, so this might end up being difficult for any future problems I run into. 

RPG maker is a game engine, which means it's got a lot of scene making stuff out of the box, with tons of shortcuts. I actually own both MX and VX ACE, so I have my choice in resources and what would best suit what I want to do. RPG Maker uses Ruby to write scripts; I have no familiarity with this language either. Since it's a script and not actual from scratch code, this does mean that there are very likely some hard limits to what I can and can't get the engine to do. It does allow for very easy importation of sprites and such, but I hate using the map creator/tileset makers that are provided with vx ace; the layers in mx make more sense to me. Either way, both programs have a ton of scripts other people have already made so I wouldn't have to reinvent the wheel. I also know for sure that the database is built in and supported, plus has a nice gui--really important for the inventory and such.

At the moment I'm leaning more strongly towards haxeFlixel; I love the ability to properly customize everything. What I will probably do to decide is try coding the starting part of the story in both--it's much shorter/less work than the whole game, and critical in either case. Then I can pick which one I want to use long term from there.

Whew. That was a lot!!!!