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[Aik]

So, I don't know what I'm doing yet, but I spent a bit of time today refactoring some oldish code for an ASCII game of some description, which I'll presumably build some kind of game for this competition out of.

I'm thinking Magic-School-Bus-esque kind of thingy, but really - nfi. 

[Aik]

Progress update:
Basically, everything that was implemented and working in the original version is now working with the exception of multiple maps/scrolling, but that should be trivial to put in. This basically means what we have is:

• Maps are loaded from a modified version of ASCII Paint/associated configuration file
• NPCs and the player character information load from a configuration file and display
• Player character movement
• Collision detection

Um - that might actually be it - it looks much more impressive in the code though

Currently I'm implementing dialogue trees, which is what sunk the earlier attempt. This time I won't be trying to use libtcod's GUI library though, which just wasn't made for this sort of thing. From the look of my notes and scribbed diagrams, things should turn out okay!

Also, my debugger is broken. I've no idea why - it was working fine yesterday, but now it's all 'no symbol tables!' and I'm all 'But I have -g on!' and it's all 'too bad!' so I'm all 'well, fuck you - I'll upgrade to a new version!'. The new versions are all '*BANG*' and 'no symbol tables!' respectively.
So ... yeah. No debugger.

Now the big question - 'what is the game about?'
I'm thinking a school setting - probably a high school, though focused on the low grades. One of those weird schools where everyone has superpowers or ... something. I don't really know :p I've certainly no idea what they're teaching.
(I'm actually kinda tempted to rip off the guy making Awake, but that would be a bit of a dick move :p )

Key influences at this point are New Mutants (v1), The Magic School Bus, and Charlotte Sometimes, with probably an emphasis on Magic School Bus-ish elements because the game's actually meant to teach stuff.

Update:
I won't triple post this, because really it's not exciting to anyone but me at this point. However, the dialogue tree system is starting to come together. At least - there is now a small portion of the correct text displaying in the right area. There's a few hairy bits ahead that I haven't really thought out, but I'm sure it'll turn out okay and hopefully not too messily.

[Aik]

Just letting everyone know that I'm all out of steam, and probably won't be entering anything.

See, everything is going well - I could probably make a game out of what I have now, and if I'd actually spent the last week coding at all it would probably be a good game. But I haven't - I've been ignoring it completely.

I blame the lack of idea. If I actually had something to aim towards, I think I could finish something. But ... I don't. My creativity is on an extended holiday or something, because I don't think I've had a single interesting idea for a game since I started this compo.

But hey, I guess I have more of an ASCII RPG engine than I did when I started, so that's kinda nice...

[Melly]

Think harder! I'm sure something could come out of it.

Actually, it might be good to jsut relax and let the inspiration come. Ingest some culture.