Devlog 1: Dialoguing

Now it’s official: I will be updating this every Sunday with the progess I have made, big or small, progress or not.

A large portion of this upcoming game with have dialogue with multiple characters, including branching paths and keeping track of quite a few events (probably way more than I could possible anticipate). Obviously trying to keep track of all of this within arrays, booleans, and dictionaries within Godot is doable but very tedious and not ideal. Using a SQLite database for storing responses was also out of the question since it relies on checking too many variables and too many events.

Luckily a Godot extension called Dialogic exists for this very purpose and provides a streamlined way of creating response trees, characters, and variables for keeping track of just about everything you would need for conversations.

I am not just making a visual novel. While there will be a decent amount of conversing with characters, that is only a secondary part of the game and it will not be a story you just click through.

With all that being said, here are some highlights from the past week:

• Adding dialogue into the game and some initial characters
• Basic UI in place, working with containers and scaling is very not fun
• Semi-functional date/time system

The game “art” is still just a basic color tileset I put together a few years ago for testing different shapes, so I may be in the process of soliciting work from an artist to actually make it look presentable. Current deadline for a good demo is October for a local indie dev expo, so stay tuned for updates.

Additionally, my X account has been unbanned after confirming that I am, indeed, not five months old.

Game of the Week

After a very long time of not really touching my 360 (the last game I played on it was Halo 3: ODST many many years ago), I’m starting to go back to a lot of exclusives that were released for it that have yet to be ported to or otherwise made available on PC, chief among them being Lollipop: Chainsaw. While I was never the biggest fan of hack-n-slashes, it is so over-the-top in its comic book setting and unflinchingly straight-faced with its innuendo that I am having too much fun with it, even overlooking its questionable design choices and constant button-mashing.

It’s fun, go dust off your 360 or PS3 and play it.