Beginning Soon

This week I tried working through the Phaser.js course on Codecademy but found out that half of the course is paywalled. I still learned a pretty valuable lesson in this course however. I need to remember to save my work more often lol. Hell, I accidentally clicked on one of my bookmarks while looking for a link to add and lost my whole dev log this week too. Sucks man. But yeah, when I went to continue working on a project I realized all of the progress I didn't save was missing. I was glad I learned this while doing a simple project. The course being cut short really sucks though. I think this is probably going to be the end of my time using Codecademy. I'm going to begin actually making something, now that I have a grasp on everything with node.js. Hopefully I can get a little movement demo up in the coming week or two. It really shouldn't take me much longer unless I'm hardcore procrastinating. Really hope I'm not foreshadowing there. But yes, I believe it's time to actually begin working on the game. It's quite overdue. 

This week I want to talk about dialogue. I have an idea for a dialogue system that uses an array of sentences and strings them together with transitionary nodes. The gist of this is to say that the dialogue will be random, in hopes of making it feel more organic. This made more sense to me the first time I wrote it out, but let me be more specific. In an example of exposition, you usually have multiple points of important information. The way I'm currently thinking about it, the order of these points is not important. And by breaking them up like this allows for a deeper experience when talking to an NPC. It is to take long pages of dialogue akin to CoC and TiTS and actually have the player asking the filler dialogue. 

I want to stay on topic with NPCs and dialogue here and talk about indirect communication. So with dialogue all being in its own space, it frees up the location aspect of talking to someone. You won't have to be right next to someone to talk to them because you'd still be able to hear them if they're a few tiles away. This can be used to great effect. NPCs can give you greetings while you're walking past, enemies can shout banter at you from anywhere in the room, or far off enemies can hear fighting and go over to investigate. You could even just say stuff into the void to attract enemies or create distractions. Could be fun to implement ditzy giggles that are involuntary too. 

Another dialogue related thing is nicknames. From my experience, only a few games ever have an option for nicknames. And in this game, if I were to have them come up naturally, I'd want NPCs to come up with them organically from your given name. But I think this is actually unrealistic given how names are. For names like Cassie from Cassandra, it's not immediately obvious how that would be extrapolated, unless I were to get a list of literally every name and manually connected some of them. I think the best response is to just allow players to create as many nicknames as they'd like, because in the case of the name Alexander, you have Alex, Al, and Xander that you could use for nicknames. Probably a couple more even. I'm hoping that this can help for expressiveness in dialogue, but I am also planning on having a few select names that are actually fully implemented, similar to Trap Quest which has its names that change with the player.

There was some other things I wrote before everything was deleted but I can't remember, and it's getting late. Go make stuff.

Links to stuff:

Trap Quest:

https://shame.games/games/trap-quest

Things to remember

hit that fucking save button every once in a while

coding is free

be creative