Hello everyone!

I'm sorry for not updating last week. I was swamped with work and was going through a lot emotionally in my personal life, and I didn't feel like even working on the game all that time. But I had done some self reflection during this time and realized that I do find joy in working on this project, especially when I look at how hard I have worked to get where I am with it, that I don't want to punish myself by stopping. I am going to continue to upload weekly dev logs up until the day of release of chapter 2, which will be sometime in June/July. Anyway, now that I have gotten that out of the way, I want to discuss the things that DID get done regarding the game:

Cut Scene Designs

I have updated the way I create and implement cut scenes. More specifically, I changed the way story flags would update which cut scene would be active and which cut scene would not. Before, I would create a class that was in charge of all the boolean flags and turning off specific cut scenes, because this is how I did it the first time. However, because I am creating even more cut scenes than before, this required more flags and more boolean logic, and the workload got harder almost exponentially.

Because of this, cut scenes will have a list of flags that it needs to check are either true or false before activating itself. This way all I really need to do is add the necessary flags for the cut scene in question, and create a method that can dynamically determine if the cut scene should be activated or not. I have implemented the code changes, right now I am trying to fix the bugs that came as a result of the refactoring, and update all cut scenes to use this new method.

CSV Data Tables

Another thing that I have been trying to implement was creating CSV files that contain data for the games specific information. These include the following:

• moves
• items
• quests
• story_flags
• game_characters

After placing these in a CSV file, I would later place the data in a specific directory that the game could pull from and use the data to instantiate whatever object I need. Whenever I need to create a new item, move or quest etc for the game, I can just update the CSV files.

I used to have all the data instantiated inside of a C# class and put into a Dictionary that would be used for later. This can take up a lot of space in memory, and would not be a viable solution long term.

I haven't finished all of the CSV files for the 2 chapters yet. Because I am playing around with the story and its elements, I wanted to keep adding them as I go. However, the code to generate the objects based on the data is essentially complete, so all I would really need to do is some final touches on the data tables first.

Goals

My goals for next Monday are the following:

• Complete overhaul of new cut scene designs (bug fixes, etc).
• Complete all cut scenes for Tiro Town chapter.
• Complete the creation of all the CSV files for the game.

Conclusion

I really want to be able to complete Chapter 1 by the end of March so that I have time to work on Chapter 2 for the next 3 months, along with any polishes and new features, so let's hope I can get back on track. Anyways, I'll see you all next week.