Progress (Patreon)

Hey everyone,

So made good progress this week. It was a bit tricky but I upgraded the character loading system to also load character logic from a file too.

I already had the framework for storing character logic in a text file rather than within Unity but honestly I wasn't using it all that much. Now I can link that character profile along with a piece of logic and then hook it into the core game.

I also updated the character load system so as levels in the game load it correctly loads and unloads any of the newly spawned characters along with the logic. This is obviously only for individual characters but it should give me flexibility on spawning characters.

Now as you load scenes it checks to see if there are any extra characters with logic to load and will load them individually into the scene.

I haven't decided how to link it to an on off system yet. I did a few experiments and I have a few interesting ideas on how to control if / when the character is active. I could make it simple and just set an active time of day or a random value.

However it would be nice if I had a more complex logic to control the activation. Obviously it's a little tricky because unlike dialogue files and event sequences I don't have like an easy text language to control something like spawning. Also I don't want something as complex as needing a full unique file just to control a characters spawn chances.

I'm going to have a sit and think of a good solution to this problem. First I'm going to start building new templates into this new system. One I see what a template involves I can then work out how to easily edit something like spawn conditions.

I have a few personal life things I need to do this week but I hope to get my first few templates working in the new system. I'm also going to update the runtime game files to support editing and testing templates in real time.  That should be a huge time saver.

But this is the first big post main quest task almost ticked off my list. I should in a week or so have a few templates for characters with logic that I can be spawned anywhere in the world. The idea is I can then hand these templates to a writer to create a series of events or dialogue changes. The writer then can edit dialogue / some events along with the character and world location for it.

All very exciting stuff. That's all for now I'm going to get back to work!