Mr. Qi Friendship and Romance Mod Devlog 5/9/2024
Previous update
For those curious about the mod progress, read on!
Since the previous update, most of my efforts have been spent on Art and Implementation. While I've made some progress on Writing, that hasn't been my main focus.
Writing
Heart Events: no major progress, besides a bit of writing/blocking for the 4 heart cutscene.
Daily Dialogues: Generic dailies are 64% done. Unique dailies are currently on the back-burner. Marriage dailies are also on the back-burner, but I have quite a few written regardless.
Misc dialogues: A new section! This includes so many little details, which even get as hyper-specific as what happens if you divorce him and then attempt to invite him to a movie. What does he say if you give him a bouquet at low hearts? What does he say if you're married to him and there are slimes in the house? Stuff like that! There are 49 of these written so far, and it's hard to estimate my progress because as I continue looking through both the documentation and existing files I get more and more ideas.
Gift Dialogues: Not a ton of progress since the previous update, though I've written his birthday gift reactions.
Art
Portraits: 2 new portraits finished: blush and shocked.
Sprites: You may have seen me posting about this, but Mr. Qi does not have a walk cycle in the vanilla game, so I had to make custom animations for him. I've also changed his color scheme to better match his sprites.
Besides that, I've also made a walk cycle for the Bouncer, who will show up in at least one cutscene, maybe two.
look at him go!
Maps: I'm really excited to announce that I've recruited someone to help with maps! Their name is wovensong, and they're currently working on the Casino VIP Room, which features in the 10 heart cutscene. They're helping with both the sprites and .tmx files, which is a huge help.
Misc sprites: none yet
Implementation
I have a functional version of Mr. Qi that can be befriended in my files now. He doesn't have a ton of dialogue in game yet, but you can give him stuff, raise his friendship, and trigger some placeholder heart events. But getting to that point has been kind of a hassle, in ways that the average modder doesn't have to deal with!
You see... the vanilla "Mister Qi" has a space in his internal name. If you know anything about coding, this should be setting off alarm bells.
Here's an example of where that's an issue: say you want to trigger a cutscene at two hearts with an NPC. You'd write something like:
f Jodi 500
which the game reads as "trigger this cutscene when you have 500 amount of friendship with the NPC named Jodi"
But if you were to write:
f Mister Qi 500
the game would go "you want me to trigger this cutscene when you have Qi amount of friendship with the NPC named Mister?? WTF?" and then SMAPI throws you a big red error and the cutscene would never trigger. Yippee!
It took me... a while to figure out how to get around this. Luckily the 1.6 update now allows for parsing for quotes in certain scenarios, so what actually works is:
f \"Mister Qi\" 500
So I'm glad that I started this mod now instead of pre-1.6!
However, it's definitely possible that the space in the internal name will cause issues down the line, so I have some (rough) code for what to do in that scenario. This involves hiding the vanilla Mister Qi, and adding a new, identical NPC with an internal name that doesn't have a space. Other mods, such as Morris Redeemed and some NPCs like Marlon and Gunther in SVE, do this as well.
And, if you're thinking that I could just change the internal name itself: maybe?? But probably not. There's some hardcoded stuff surrounding Mister Qi, and I worry about breaking it. Additionally, if any future official Stardew updates added new content revolving around Mister Qi, there's a risk that the mod would break in more serious ways.
Final Notes
Overall, I feel like I'm making pretty good progress! There's still a lot to get done, but I'm proud of the work I've done so far. Thanks for reading!
