Different approach

Here are some images from my new setup. I'm still working on making things as simple as possible to go from these visual objects to a usable output.

The nouns come in a variety of shapes and sizes depending on what they might be sized like in relation to each other. The spheres are all verbs for each particular noun. Its a little crowded but there are various ways to filter out game objects in the scene view. Layer filters can hide entire groups of things pretty easily. Also there is a useful search field that can drill down on names, tags, types etc. within the scene. Here is a zoomed out view of this level.

I've wasted my week, how about you?

I've been torturing myself with making thousands of lines of Unity Editor GUI code for this past week and I just realized how much of a waste it was. I don't even feel like describing how horrible it's been writing this stuff, so I'll skip that part and get to the solution that I've been ignoring. I was brainstorming about solving one of the random problems when I had this epiphany to just delete all the code! I can use the editor as is to create a hierarchy of the objects that I need for a game. Using placeholder objects, I can create an entire visual structure of both the game world and the text. Then once I'm ready I can use a build function to analyze the scene, convert GameObjects into data and write that data to txt files for run time. I should be up an running with this solution by Monday if I'm right.

Unity users might be thinking 'well duh', but hear me out. I'm using Unity for text based games so I had no reason to consider the scene view/hierarchy for design time work. Unity users might then wonder why use Unity for text based games anyway. Uhh... I don't know, stop pestering me hypothetical Unity User!

Plan G

Just a small update.

A few days back I stopped writing to work on building the world for Burn and I realized that it was really hard to do. Everything in the world has a displayed name and a unique identifier that is used for all kinds of stuff within the system. There are some simple checks done in the code to make sure that these identifiers don't intersect, but the corrective code also liked to change the identifiers while the displayed names were being edited. The end result was corruption of the data so I started to just manually edit identifiers in json. Managing hundreds of these identifiers for each person, place and verb becomes impossible after a while. So I've taken a step back to think about what the hell I'm doing.

The identifier doesn't need to be known by the player, but it also doesn't need to be known by the developer. The corrective code was there to prevent data issues, but it was a solution to a problem that shouldn't exist anyway. I was certain that other systems don't require any kind of management of identifiers like this but I hadn't really looked into any of them. I've been kind of stubborn about trying different game engines and I've even passed on working on projects that don't use Unity. Since I am basically trying to do things that have been done before I decided to look into how rooms are made in Inform, Adrift and Tads.

Plan E, possibly F

As it turns out I've decided to push all my focus into a single delivery to be the game rather than several deliveries. There is more than enough good stuff within this delivery I'm working on to serve as a demo of the system that I'm building. It's probably better to keep things as simple as possible any way. If I can get this first part right then I'll be in a better place to expand into the events before and after the delivery later on.

One thing that I have to figure out is how to work around the choices that could have been made that influence the main character's state during this delivery. I don't think I can avoid talking about how the player's day has gone, but I also don't want to rely on specific past events to drive the story. If I can't make this work in a good way, I'll have to stick to my old plan but extend my deadline for sure.

[spoilers ahoy]

Plot

Do you like development updates? Interested in spoilers? Than do I have a blog post for you...