Sorry not much coding was done, but I got into some asset-making. It's Calcia! I intend these to be placeholders alongside Carrie, I'm trying to work with something that's quick to make and write with before I commit to a look for something "serious". Uh, if that makes sense? Basically I'm still being loose with stuff and when I start making something serious, I'm gonna make better art. Yeah.
Also, trying to make a video soon! I'm going to be submitting Carrie to Steam Greenlight in the next days, so keep an eye out for that.
Here’s progress on the VNgine, I got bogged down with a lot of homework so not as much was made as I wanted. No new "assets" being made or real experiments in making stuff.
What I did get finished were multiple sprites. Now more than one character can be on screen that you can talk to! And with that comes a new for properly animating which of them is talking. The "Change Talk Sprite" button cycles between four options of either character talking, both, or neither. I also started work having the game save "name tags", as in the name you'll see in the dialogue box when speaking to a certain character.
I still need to tweak those better so it's saving and chaning information optimally. I also thought of a lot of changes to coding that I want to do at some point to make it more efficient and better for adding/removing buttons.
Here's progress on the VNgine so far! There's a lot of large images so I kept it under a Read More, but for a tl;dr:
I added in the ability to add custom variables and made commands to change them, as well as compare them against another value to perform one of two results.
I split up the buttons to different categories, which I can toggle with the mode buttons on the top right. Assets are graphical stuff, Commands are the bubbles that show up in the string and change how it gets drawn, as well as jumping to different scenes and strings.
Variable mode is the most complicated one that I mainly worked on this week.
New variable adds one to a separate ini file, letting me name the variable and set it's default value. With Pick Variable I can select a variable from the list to mess with, including setting a new default.
Call Var is what places the variable into the string, showing up in the player mode as their full value.
In this example of Choice Mode (strings allowing players to select from multiple options), I use Change Var to call a different action on a variable. I can add, subtract, multiple, or directly set a variable in the game by some other number. In the player mode, the game automatically parses all that text to perform the necessary stuff.
Place Split inserts a tag that compares a variable to a set value in one of four ways, and executes one of two results. In the example above it jumps to one string or another, the one shown incrementing the variable until it's high enough.
This stuff took a while to figure out but it gives me a lot of control over quickly making something that gives more potential to any works I write in it. With this I can start tracking things like money, relationship levels, flags, inventory, and so on, and then have the game split off to different strings/scenes in response to it. I don't know if my initial works in it will be that complicated (I don't even know if I'll have the confidence to post it on tumblr even, part of the point of this is to build experience in writing), but this opens up a lot more possibilities for interactivity and letting readers craft their own experience.
Preview of a text editor I’ve been working on in Game Maker. It saves/loads/edits data from ini files. Sorry the text is tiny! Fullscreen if you want to see it.
