Weekly Progress Update (1 of ?):Sorry about not having an update yesterday. I am in the process of implementing a new system and yesterday was mostly backend work.
I have realized that, even as the game combat and playable content starts to take shape (I still need to do combat rebalances for most enemies, though), the world where the game takes place had not been developed accordingly. The plan was thus to start working on level modelling and design this week, but I decided to shift gears and work on other aspect of world design.
This is what I have as of today:
It doesn't look like much yet (and there're still some bugs) but what's important is not only that there are NPCs now, but the system I'm going to use to drive their dialog.
Instead of having proper dialog trees, I have chosen to have a more procedural approach:
SCRIPT
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NEEDS
HELPERS_CURRENT_HELPER
2
NEEDS
HELPERS_FIRST_PLAYTHROUGH
0
TEXT
IT'S TIME TO GET YOU OUT OF HERE! AGAIN...
END
1
SCRIPT
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NEEDS
HELPERS_CURRENT_HELPER
2
NEEDS
HELPERS_FIRST_PLAYTHROUGH
1
TEXT
THERE'S NO TIME FOR QUESTIONS! LET'S GO!
END
1
What you have there is the script shape of two different lines of dialog. Each line has a priority it needs to trigger (current priority in that file needs to be higher than the line's priority), a priority it set at it's end, and a set of conditions that need to be true (and that I can add to by scripting) for it to trigger.
Obviously, for some cutscenes I will have to create a regular dialog tree (which is easy using this framework), but this is for the moment a system that will allow me to write at a decent speed. And that will offer some variation in different playthroughs, which I need to make the continuous replays feel different and keep a sense of discovery.
At the moment I'm hand writing the scripts, but once I have a working proof of concept, I might look into creating an editor to more easily being able to see relationships between the different lines (to make sure the conversations make sense).
The rest of the week is going to be focused on writing the three robots that help you escape (you can *barely* see them in the GIF) and finishing the start cutscene (so it stars the robots and their conversations). If I have time, I will use the system to create nice tutorial tips, too.
This is something that is going to allow me to bring a lot of personality into the game, and I'm very excited to see where I can take this...
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