That’s riiiiight, my weekly ramblings are back on track! Didja miss me? Aha, don’t answer that.
So, on Tuesday we did a little bit of tidying up in the game – getting rid of duplicate events, checking out where I left off and finalising the TODO list for existing mechanics. The main thing that I’m hoping might make things easier in the future is having all of my On start of layout events under one event rather than spread across the event sheet.
Firstly, it looks neater and means that in theory, if for some reason my game doesn’t work on startup, I can look at that one group of events and find the problem. In theory. Plus, one of the things I’ve picked up from the Construct Community is DRY – Don’t Repeat Yourself. So, I’m trying to go through my code and thin down excess events! Annoyingly some things don’t work without their own event blocks, but hey, I’m not messing things (yet) if they work!
As for the TODO, the player’s movement needs re-working - currently, you can’t face a solid if you’re already alongside it. Then there’s the Z-order system for which I’ll probably rummage through Skymen’s tutorial course for inspiration – at the moment, the player can stand on NPC’s head which is not ideal! And then there’s the follower NPC who’s still acting a little squiffy – that needs a fair bit of work! So there’s still plenty of bits and pieces to be cracking on with, not to mention the bane of my life – the dialogue system.
Yes, I’ve been complaining about this for a while now, but I figured I’d update you on how that’s going. I found a tool to help me build the dialogue out visually, but it exports the file as a JSON – so I’m trying to teach myself about JSON. FUN! This is going to take a while, but I am hoping by the time I’ve figured it out, I’ll be in a position to write some good resources on using JSON, particularly in the sense of a dialogue system. (If anyone wants to help, I’m all ears!)
So while I do have a lot to be getting on with, it might not be the most exciting thing on the stream. As an alternative, we did float the idea in the office to do some small ‘see how far you can get making X’ streams, what do you guys think? I was planning on bringing this Idea Generator in from BAFTA YGD to spice things up a little too.
And as for the gameplay streams, I started Rabisco this week! This game from Mateus Sales is absolutely adorable. AND SO HARD. So thanks for the recommendation Nepeo, the death counter got up to 59 during Thursday’s stream.
What might be fun though, is a little leaderboard – who can complete Rabisco with the fewest deaths? Or maybe not complete it, because I might not do that… But you get the idea! Let’s talk about it in next Thursday’s stream.
Anyway. This is turning into quite the wall of text, so I’ll wrap this up. Till next week!