Happy Thanksgiving

Happy Thanksgiving!

I know it's strictly a United States thing, so happy *appropriate harvest holiday* to everyone that doesn't celebrate Thanksgiving. :D

I figure that a lot of people will be busy traveling and dealing with in-laws, so may not even see an update until after the holiday is over, so I thought I'd go ahead and do the post early. We're going to have a little tropical storm type thing on thanksgiving day, to provide some extra entertainment with our food. (Tropical Storm Man-Yi)

Besty is just now getting back from his vacation to Italy, and I've been busy working on all sorts of things, mostly npc conversation-related. I also finished up the scenario system, which is basically a display independent from the main passage navigation. It's handy for interrupts, scenarios, and situations where you want finer control of potential action. I talked about it a little more in-depth in the post about the interaction system a little while back. Here's a quick screenshot:

This is just showing random stuff for testing purposes, it's like a little secondary instance of Twine/SugarCube going on, and this is just showing the different major elements that can be used. The design is fairly rough, but I was just focusing on getting the mechanical portions ready for use. I also added a new option to the system settings:

The developer build of the game has a lot of information sent to the console (press F12 to open the console in your browser). I hide this information on most release builds, as is standard practice in most situations. Generally it's not necessary to see, and printing it uses slightly more system resources. In fact, there's usually a lot of information coming out that wouldn't really make sense to anyone but us, and sometimes will make it seem like things are going wrong somehow... It IS useful when trying to find a bug or track down the source of a reported issue, thus the addition. 

The other work isn't quite as easy to show, as it's just a bunch of code. Toward the end of last week I did another round of code improvement and testing because we're working towards getting the existing framework nice and stable for our transition to phase 3 early next year. One thing I can show you though is something I fooled around with for a bit on Sunday:

I've received a lot of suggestions to try out the Dynamic Avatar Drawer. I agree that it's nice to see the look of your character, though I'm not a huge fan of the appearance of the Dynamic Avatar. The focus on transformation animations leaves the avatar without stroke lines that you'd normally see with simply shaded characters like this. It leaves features difficult to distinguish, which I think is my main stylistic issue. There are some advantages to the system though. Once all the work to convert game variables into Dynamic Avatar scale ranges is done, it's pretty simple to represent a good deal of variations to match game characters.

At some point it'd be nice to have professional art for the body portraits, but as that will probably be quite some time before it happens, this seems like a decent interim solution. (Let me know what you think!)

So that's it for now, I'm going to get back to the code mines before enjoying Thanksgiving tomorrow. 

o/