I finished the evidence pass today- awesome. I’m not exactly sure what my next pass should be, actually. Probably conversations- in my game, I have branching conversations. Not deep branching Mass Effect style things, but they do have consequences. I actually really like using my conversation system. It might be one of the best little game systems I’ve ever authored. Some excellent students of mine created a game that uses it quite well. It has the best attributes of a good game system: simple, adaptable to a lot of situations, fun to use, with limitations that actually help creativity (NPCs can have custom reactions to each answer, but that is the extent of the branching, so the conversations you create must stay within certain boundaries. It works quite well).
My conversations also have a score that can be saved and used later for anything you might desire. So if you do well in a conversation and rack up 100 “conversation points,” that can be used in a simple number comparison for things. Like I said: simple and effective. It just does very simple table queries, so as long as you setup a data table properly, it is good to go.
The conversation pass will take some time to complete, of course, because I have to write all that dialog! I hope to get that done before I go on vacation next week. That’s a good goal: I’ll feel pretty good about my game’s progress if I can do that. We’ll see!
One thing I wanted to share that I thought was amusing: my github log. This is the life of a professor, right here:
Yep, as you might guess, the green blocks are when I submit code changes to my repository. (Github works awesome when it’s a solo project. Alas, perforce/subversion reign supreme for teams in game work). You can clearly see when I have breaks from my Purdue duties. Pretty obvious, isn’t it?
Until next time, detectives…