Working on the Text! (Patreon)

Hey everyone!

A huge thankyou to all my supporters.

No glossy images to go with today's post unfortunately. I've been hard at work on upgrading some internal text tools.

So I mentioned in my previous post that many aspects of the project were taking longer than I wanted so I've been putting a little more focus for the last week on a few workflow tools.

An upgrade to the internal engine went out the the writers that has significantly increased how quickly they can add content into the game. It also added more flexibiliy into all the random NPC's dialogue to make sure the world can really respond to your diapered state.

These effective upgrades inspired me to look at even more ways I can make the project easier to add content into.

One issue that slows down development is when I get content I have to build out the event graphs and then run the game. If an external party like the writers wants to test I need to run a full build (which takes hours). This is required for even simple events like multiple chaining dialogue files.

I need ways to write and test the content quickly and without re-building the whole game. So I've been working on a way to load raw dialogue and allow for simple sequences to be encoded in the same text file.

I'm really hoping to branch this out into a full sequence machine that can allow for some events to be run through a text file that can be dynamically loaded. This way you can write a sequence of events/dialogue and test those elements without re-building the project or even re-starting the application.

These files will still need to be put in by hand to make sure they are linked to the save game system. But a way to write and debug quickly will be a powerful tool to improve turnaround and simplify this process this to adding a single sequence node that has been pre-tested.

I really think if I spend a little bit of time now just helping out the content pipeline especially for what people want (story content) I can speed up development. I'm going to be dedicating myself over the next week to creating better and faster ways to add and test content.

I'll probably be working on this tool over the weekend but I'm really excited because these small tool improvments are giving me results that are even better than I expected.