Dev Log 18/10/2019

Ok, so here we are again. I thought about doing one of these weekly, but really, I don't think it's necessary. And I also take some time writing this, so I would prefer to dedicate my time to the new project instead.

Now, talking about the new project, I'm know a lot of people want to see it as soon as possible and I like where it's going and I'm really excited to show it to everyone, but there are a lot of things I want to finish before that still.

If anyone here was there and remember, when I started LoF, it was a mess. The models sucked (literally and figuratively), there was barely any interface, dialogues were very artificial among other stuff that I don't even remember. The reason for that was mostly because I started it without knowing if it would go anywhere, I didn't have much time to work on it, little experience with Daz and Renpy and so on.

But now things are different. I learned a lot from doing LoF and I already know I can do a good game. I'm not saying it's easy or trying to brag or anything, I'm just saying that I know that if I work hard I can do something that people will enjoy. So that's what I'm doing. I don't want to put out a low-quality game and then make it better as I go. I want it to be the highest quality it can be from the start and then just add content to it as I go.

Now regarding each topic:

Coding:

Pretty much all I'm doing at the moment is programming. There is a bunch of systems I want to have in place for the first release and those take some time to build. I'm trying to make everything in a very modular way so that it's a lot easier to add content in the future. Which will make future releases much faster. A good portion of this is already done, but not all of it. 

If anyone knows what I'm talking about and is interested in this stuff: (basically I built a bunch of classes and subclasses for a lot of things in the game, like Map, Actor, Object, Player, Npc, etc. The idea is that everything will be a instance of one of those classes and when I need something I just call the method that generates it for me. For example, a location is a instance of the class Map, which has Actors and Objects associated with it. So, if I want a menu of all the people I can interact with in this location I just call the method that generates a list of tuples of the people and pass it to the menu function. Then the Actor handles the interaction by itself. This allows me to have a lot more dynamic stuff without being restricted by the way renpy handles the game flow. I already did some if this in LoF, but I'm going much deeper with this one.)

GUI:

I did some pretty nice gui stuff too. Some special screens for certain actions the player can take, some interface buttons to get to those screens, etc. Some of these gui elements use the dynamic generation of code and text that I mentioned before, so everything ties in together. When I started LoF the interface was a very clunky (and bad tbh) and this time I'm trying to have a good interface right away. I'm also adding tutorial messages when new features get unlocked and such.

Writing:

As I mentioned before, the story for the whole 1st adventure is outlined, but now I'm going throught each part of it and writing every paragraph of narration and dialogue in detail. I'm mostly done for the narration, but I still need to finish some dialogues and the adult scene (just the writing, the cgs are finished)

Models:

I'm done with models for now. I did 10 models total, among which 5 are important characters that got a lot of thought put into their appearance, features and clothing and the other 5 are more generic, random characters that are not very important and I didn't spend much time on them. I think all 10 will have an appearance in the first release already, but maybe 2 of them will appear later, I have to figure out something first.

Conclusion

That's it, I hope you guys enjoyed the report and I'll see you next time!

Tl;Dr: I'm mostly coding stuff that takes some time to do now, but will save much more time in the long run.