Day 5 - Completable puzzles

mauve on 2014/10/10 01:05 of Wasabi Jam

So far I have one whole scene completed... of 10. But the engine is practically all there now, so the content production can accelerate. There are no major features to implement tomorrow, just puzzles and dialogue. On Saturday morning I'll spend some time honing the script and then I'll have the rest of the day to bring everything together.

I'm still wrestling with the number of combinations of things, but I have a system of wildcards that allows certain responses to cover off a lot of object combinations. There's also a 'random' directive to pick a random phrase, which will help reduce the repetitiveness of such an approach.

It is still very surprising how much effort it takes to organises the states correctly, even with a directive-driven system like I have. I have to be careful about the wrong handlers being left in - for example, referring to an object that has since been disposed of, or a dialogue that involves a character who has left. I had more time perhaps I could write some sort of clever validation of the state machine would be useful, to prove that the script is completable, and so on. But I don't, so it's a manual and slow process. Lots of play testing still to do.