Submissions from 2015-11-18 to 2015-11-19 (1 total)

A submission for Make games. 298

I was looking through some of my earliest entries, and saw where I had wondered what to do about slow readers. My solution is to keep a journal that at any time you can go back and review what someone said. Of course this is important even if you are able to keep up with the text, to keep track of what's going on, and remember who is trying to trick who into falling in love with who so that you can appropriately mess things up by readdressing the love letter to someone who will be really offended so that they will go get in a fight with the original character and keep them from making it to the party where you will be able to do something else since they aren't there to stop you... or something :)

I started by trying to figure out how to record the lines that the player sees, which is more complicated than you would think. First, every spoken line is spoken independently by the npc who is talking. I have to actually figure out which one of these independent dialog boxes is the one that's on the screen to record that, and pass the message into a global variable somewhere. Secondly, the code that launches the dialog boxes and the code that obscures the letters if the player is out of earshot are in different places. So while the more natural place to record the journal does not know which letters were obscured.

I did hack together something that kind of works, minus the obscured letters; and put the journal into a menu for now.

Le sigh. I think some refactoring is in my future.