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.

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...

Burn

I've been working on bug fixes recently, one with the interface and another with system performance under taxing conditions. Aside from tech stuff I spent more time planning the game itself. 'Untitled' and 'Project 4' are a little vague so I'm calling the game 'Burn' unless some better name comes to mind. It's going to be a very simple story about a pizza delivery guy (pretty original huh). I'm fighting the urge to implement stats but I know I have more than enough to handle considering this kind of game format is new to me. So far I have a good feeling about this project.

Post

I'm getting closer to actually writing (for better or worse), but I am always finding game system improvements to make that take up time. That and I am trying to put more stuff in place to automate some of the tedious parts of working on the game. For example I'm auto generating basic stub responses for actions as displayed here:

The stubs aren't usable in the final game, but having placeholders made from the world data helps skip a few steps in development.

That image also shows the undo system which is working really well so far, which is great news. The not so great news is that adding the undo history to save data breaks saving. So that's the next thing to fix.

[Edit: Fixed] I made a few hacks and saves work again with history included. Currently 32 steps are saved in your history, so 32 choices are packed in with a game save. 32 is just a number I chose but it may change depending on issues that might arise with the amount of data stored. I still have to make an interface into managing game saves but currently they are just stored as a text file in a temporary directory.

Adding features

Here are few that are pretty nice and implemented for the most part. Starting with support for screen resizing/resolution changes, for mobile and desktop.