Friday Rambles and Game Dev Update 2022-03-10

It's Friday... again...

The chickens have come home to roost, as they say, and I had to take a couple days off this week to recover from my body finally rebelling against my free-wheeling game dev lifestyle of sitting hunched over at my desk for 12 hours a day. I made a bunch of ergonomic changes to my desk setup and am now exclusively using a standing desk to keep myself from slouching and drinking more water and am doing more exercising and stretches and stuff to keep my body from deteriorating further. Anyway.

I still got a bunch of stuff done this week.

- I finally drew the character icons for the phone call screen (been using placeholder squares forever).

- A bigger thing is that I completely redid the way the player moves throughout the game, by making an "action menu" that serves as the central point for all actions available for any given location. Instead of one long dialogue script with like 3 million branching nodes every time I added a new "location" to do stuff in, which was becoming super unmanageable. This is somewhat obvious in retrospect, but hey, this whole project is a huge learning experience for me. Then I ripped apart the entire dialogue script file and organized it around the new process, which was a lot of busywork.

(test choices for talk menu)

- I also like it because it serves as a kind of breather for the player instead of the game just progressing the entire time non-stop through dialogue boxes and choice menus. The buttons are supposed to be post-it notes Penny doodled on. I hope that's obvious lol. Like the ones stuck to her computer monitor.

- Also you can save only at this menu. It's because I'm bad at coding and don't want to deal with a thousand different ways people can break saving and loading mid-yarn-node. (Okay I tried and it works but it's super brittle and I don't have time to rewrite everything and test everything to support some magic unbreakable solution that survives changes in node contents between game versions or whatever). The game isn't even that long anyway, and you can still save more often than Va11Halla's two-saves-per-in-game-day system which is basically all that matters to me. And now I have a better appreciation for why games have save points.

Anyway, this all doesn't look really interesting when I write it down to share on a dev blog, but it's important work and it'll enable me to finish up this game at super speed instead of slogging through making a thousand new menus in the dialogue script every time I add a new location, or spending a week figuring out why loading isn't working correctly in super specific situations like when you save during the second dialogue line that happens when Whiskey is mad at you for playing Lumber Lass while talking to her. Tradeoffs.

I've made peace with the fact that this game won't be done in March (lol), but I don't think I should abuse my body (more) to get it done faster. The game made some real big progress these past two months and it's really looking (and working) like a real game, I think, so it shouldn't be much longer...

Okay, time to go jogging, it's been raining all week and there's like an hour window right now where I won't get soaked if I go outside.

Thanks for your support, as always!