x'mas update!

finally it's done. spent more than an entire week (including x'mas eve and x'mas!!) scrapping the architecture after the mda open house,
adding some features and also stabilizing some others.

a quick summary of wat i've done:
1) chapter concept added, that controls all the scenes.
2) scenes can be locked and unlocked later, if an item opens a prop.
3) creating a new item or opening a prop attains objectives (and show them as ticked in the objectives screen)
4) paperdoll screen appears i) when a new player starts up for first time, ii) when the player clicks wardrobe.
(please delete prefs.dat before running the app...)
5)revamped gib's paperdoll screen to be more user-friendly i.e. all the stuff are laid out on a grid and u just click on what u want.

the new hierarchy is
first u load a chapter.
the chapter loads
i)all the characters that will ever appear (even across diff scenes),
ii)objectives of the chapter
iii)all the items that will ever appear in this chapter (even across diff scenes)
iv)all the different screens and separates them into locked or unlocked

then u load the scenes,
which within itself contains
i)the dialogues,
ii)the qna,
iii)the props

the dialogues and qna has a characterid to them, and they will cause the respective person in the characters array under the chapter to be rendered.

the last thing i have left to do is the 2nd image of the prop. e.g. the opened door.
p.s. gib, can u help me prepare an image for that?
pls add in the grid thing u were saying u did for the paperdoll inside the paperdoll.cpp. thanks.

merry x'mas! i'm need a break.

New stuff

It has been a while since the last update. The MDA Open House was extremely useful in helping us to gauge player response and the survey forms handed out turned in some pretty surprising feedback. We have implemented 1 additional feature as that feature turned out to be a surprise hit with the female audience and I have set up Mantis Bugtracker to track bugs and feature enhancements for me and XP.

We now have another artist on board and that makes 2 freelance artists. 1 will take care of concept and characters and the other will take care of the background. We have retooled out storyline to be something short and simple and with our Mantis database getting full of items. It is going to be a very busy Christmas for all of us.

Merry Christmas, everyone :)

3rd milestone today

ok today is the 3rd milestone.
so what have i done?
it might seem that our build this time round is not much different from the last milestone on the surface, but that's not the case. i did a major overhaul on the codes structure, taking apart gib's and then restructuring them.
the thing about both of us is, gib is good at figuring out new stuff, he's able to start quickly on a new platform and show u something on the screen. while i will do the garbage cleaning and give u a pretty structure. i probably won't have new things on the screen for u in the first few weeks.
anyway,
what happens is previously, everything was defined per location.
so we had location1_screwdriver, location1_newspaper something like that.. which meant that this screwdriver and newspaper, were just used in location1. and because that's the variable name of that item now, if i need a newspaper in chapter 5 say location x, i have to declare a new one. because the codes have to somehow be able to create a new string with the current location id to refer to this variable.

so xp changed that (because we also got the reminder that we prob need another script-writer which might not be a programmer). now the items are just id-ed with a unique number, and its name in the string table which the script will get thru the id. Then i have a script called Scene, which holds the id of everything i need, location, character, dialogues etc, and the codes will composite them. in this way, a non programmer can refer to our list of items, and just write new scripts for new scenes easily. better still, i can reuse my parts like lego bricks. ;)

3rd try at the girls

ok this is another new set of characters from our artist. they are all very nice, but not what i'm looking for. she's trying again now, this time i've asked her to try exaggerated features and another art style..

though the first character that one might see for the current build is the father character,
the artist and i both feel that it's easier to settle on the main character first, and then fit the rest of her world in. we need time to come up with a good design that strikes an impression on ppl, it's not uncommon to scrap 50 characters, and i think so far we've scrapped 30.

Music, please

I have managed to add the music and sound code to the demo. It was pretty easy using Playground's engine and I added some classical music and royalty free sound effects to the game. This has enhanced the mood of the game dramatically. I have also created a LUA file that stores the name and paths of the sound files so that a non-programmer can change the sound and music without affecting the code.

As Playground supports only OGG, I had to use Audacity to convert my WAV and MP3 files to OGG for use in the Playground engine.

second batch of concept for the main char

2nd batch of concept art from our artist, with more differentiating styles..