Project Development Journal Week 2

Tools Used

Resources Abused

What happened this week?

Last week I wrote a big day-by-day writeup of everything I did.

I'm not going to this week for two main reasons:

It all starts last Sunday night. After publishing last week's devlog, I was trying to implement a climbing system into the movement controller I had been using then (the linked Source-like movement controller in last week's log).

It was extremely fucking jank.

This led me down an extremely annoying rabbit hole: is there a movement controller that has all of the features I want? The answer may shock you: not really!

The big one was swimming. There's a lot of pretty danged good smoovement shooter controllers for Godot.

But not swimming! They don't have swimming! The Source-like controller I found and linked this week had swimming, as well as a lot of other features I enjoy (CSS Surfing? Oh hell yeah!) but trying to hack mantling or sliding into it was not something I could easily process!

This is because, while I am very smart, I still dropped out of Computer Science after my Freshman year of undergrad.

Remember as you see everything that I've done: I HAVE A FUCKING MASTERS IN ENGLISH.

That, if anything, should serve as a pointer for how easy it can be to learn these tools. I was insanely lazy in my Masters program, and even a loaf like me can at least try to learn these things. I believe in you. You can too.

Anyways, that haunted me for most of this week. Whenever I wasn't haunted by it, I was haunted by something far worse.

That fucking horse game.

Now,  I'm no NorthernLion, but I love me some Umamuseme. I also love Girls: Frontline.

When I went to bed Monday night, I was plagued by the visions. What if you combined the two?

So I spent Tuesday through Friday implementing it.

And because of dear friends of the show Ceg Ceggingtons and Kara "Mel" Danzen encouraging me to not take the lazy way out, I also had to implement a way to dynamically load in files with character dialogue, campaign objectives, all that shit.

Did you know that Godot has so many good dialogue managers already available in the asset store?

As far as I can tell, however, they can only have dialogue editted within the Godot editor. If you want your modders to use the Godot Editor, that's fine.

I am deranged, however, and from hating how modding Nuclear Option means I would have to install that godawful fucking Unity piece of shit editor to even ATTEMPT to just make a skin for it (and it rarely worked for me -- UNITY WOULD JUST NEVER FUCKING RUN!) boiled my skin alive and made me actively like the game less, I chose the far stupider option.

I developed my own shitty VN dialogue simulator.

I am very lucky that I am emulating two games that do not really have that much in-depth VN choices, then, because I would be miserable if I had to actually figure things out.

See, as it turns out, Godot natively has pretty good support for dynamically reading INI files. To spell it out obviously: I managed to make a games entire dialogue and character system use only INI files to read in all of the necessary information for a character and for a VN scene and work.

Well, I'm pretty sure it works, at least. It crashes if you run out of side events for a character.

I also still haven't coded the equivalent to races in Tactical Android Training Academy, either.

Look, I got pretty far in four days. I'll post a bit more about it when it's a bit less programmer arty. I really do believe in it.