Devlog 17: Arguing

Many things were done this past week, so I will try to go over them in detail.

Dialogue

I’ve started to add several different branching pathways for different conversations. In my first post I talked about the Dialogic addon for Godot which makes adding and managing characters and conversations very easy. However, it still has quite a few drawbacks:

• It’s still in alpha, so it’s very buggy and unpolished. Trying to rearrange text events sometimes does nothing at all, so you have to delete and recreate the whole dialogue branch. Very annoying.
• The conversation view is ordered in a top-down, Scratch-like manner. For basic conversations this is fine, but when you have several different dialogue options or branching paths it can get very confusing very quickly. Dialogic allows you to split dialogue into multiple parts/files though, but I would need to rearrange my existing conversations to accomodate this. If it were in a freeform, flowchart-like view it’d be a lot easier to understand and rearrange.

Tilesets

After some reworking by both me and the artist I hired the tileset now looks and fits the game world much better than it did before. However, this involved taking a lot of the existing tiles and creating separate scenes for each of them with different collisions. Initially most of the props were part of the tileset, but when placed in the game world they all had the same right-angle orientation, and you can only rotate tiles 90 degrees in each direction or flip them. But now the props look more natural and fit with the game world.

Doors

I had put this off for a while thinking it would be hard. Turned out to be one of the easier parts to program, specifically with the help of the tween function in Godot (change X property to Y value over Z period of time). So now the player and NPCs can open and close doors easily. Additionally, using tween also fixed a long-standing bug I was dealing with regarding the player’s PDA at different resolutions; using a tween for this was much better than an AnimationPlayer.

Gameplay

It occurred to me earlier this week that the main gameplay loop (the management part of the game) is not very fun. Right now the main tasks the player has to do are very menial, tedious, and repetitive, and will probably disengage most players before they even get to the other parts of the game. Trying to do a multi-genre game also runs the risk of narrowing the target audience, as they may only be interested in one part of the game instead of another. So I’m working on finding ways to make a boring office job “fun”, if such a thing is even possible. I have a few ideas in my head, but some extra input is always appreciated.

So to put it all into a nice little list:

• Added branching dialogue options
  • Player can ask NPCs questions and get different responses from them based on who they’ve talked with, what they know, and learn more about their personalities, relationships, and the game world.
• Added doors
• Reworked UI to scale better at different resolutions
• Reworked tile alignments and made props separate scenes

Game of the Week

Part of my inspiration for this game comes from my love of Splinter Cell, even though I’ve only played the first two games (the first one many, many times through). However, I’ve yet to complete Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory as something else has always been in the way before I could get it done. It’s one of the best-looking games on the original Xbox by far, and the controls feel so smooth that I get really upset with myself for not completing it.