Spawning Characters (Patreon)

Hey everyone,

Been working away at some technical stuff. I've had some success at getting some of these new systems working.

This image is testing the ability to spawn a character into a map. It's not exciting looking but pretty important. So one of these characters despite being on the map was not loaded from the map it was loaded independently from my own data structure.

This was a little tricky because while I designed the player character to load and save none of the NPC's are designed to be saved outside of the actual level. So I needed to transfer the tech across from the player. Although obviously the NPC"s don't have like an inventory to give items to I have to directly apply them. The result is good tho.

After trying to work out the best way to create an "editor" for creating these characters I hit on a neat solution. My first attempt was a tool that I quickly realized was like way to complex. I sorta just went why bother I have a whole game about like customizing your character. So I actually updated tool so I dress my character up / set the appearance. Then I can simply walk to the location I want the new character and hit a special save button. Once I've done that I then have the save file for a custom NPC at that location.

I can pass that NPC file to the loading mechanism and when the map loads it loads any NPC files.

This is obviously just step one. I now need to make sure these new NCP's link to full event files. It's unlikely they would support something as complex as like a full quest interaction but I figure this would be a good way to create characters like Majorie ext. I also hope it would be a good way to put relationship / caregiver moments around the island.

Linking events to these characters I hope won't be too difficult. What I will likely do is connect them to a broader like event file that contains the events and character. The challenge will be working out the code to decide if a character should spawn or not.

The easy answer is assume the character would just always be in that location regardless of game progress or whatever. But I was thinking it would be interesting if I could set it up so they could have conditions applied. Like maybe they are in a different location with a different event at a specific time of day.

Anyway progress is being made. If I can load and link event files to these characters I'll have a good basis. I also need to create a way to load like a more complex set of characters or events but honestly that is a little simpler than this.

That's all for now I'm deep in the code for the engine so don't expect anything too cool looking. I'm also likely to go back and dig into a few more of the bugs that have been around for awhile.