Stripping Down

My adventure continues…

Putting the event picking overhaul to the side for the moment, I’ve continued working on the rest of the schedule system. As I explained last time, I’ve created an outline of everything that currently happens (and a lot of things I intend to have happen) during a day in the game.

Using that outline as a base, I’ve been building a new version of the main loop of the game (while trying my best not to destroy the original in the process, just yet). I’ve been slowly making it functional…with the notable exception of not actually having it play any game scenes.

I suppose it really is a complete rebuild of the backbone of the game, though it doesn’t look like much just yet. Right now, it’s the basic game stripped down to its bare core. To give you an idea, I’ll post some screenshots of what it looks like to “play” part of a day.

As you can see, it’s just annotations of when we jump to a new block of time… though I’ve thrown in some backgrounds to help me tell what’s happening at a glance, too (and there’s a new dynamic version of the PC’s room background that automatically changes based on time of day). Each line that mentions what’s supposed to be happening is a placeholder for a game function or event-picker.

This build revises the game schedule a bit, breaking up a 24 hour day into 9 “blocks” of differing lengths. It doesn’t make complete sense from a realism standpoint (club work shifts likely wouldn’t be during those hours), but I think it’ll be okay for our needs.

As I’ve been going through each of these sections and clarifying what needs to happen in each, I’ve been adding the new functions whenever it’s something straightforward (the basic passage of hours, days, and weeks is in). If it’s not, I’ll leave myself notes and reference the existing game code that I’ll need to revisit or modify to make it work.

In the process of doing all this, it’s made it very clear why it’s often hard for me to put new things into the game—some of my older code is truly appalling.

The portion of the game intended to update the PC’s stats became an area of the game where I just shoveled anything I didn’t know how else to deal with.

The part of the code that’s supposed to pick a work scene to display also had duplicate versions of code intended to do the same thing, as well as a really poorly-written system for tracking how many days the PC worked at each job type. (I’ve already replaced these with two new functions handling the PC’s job assignments and keeping track of their work history—and now I’ll be able to put them in a place where I can find them later.)

For the players, this isn’t the most entertaining thing I could be working on right now, but I’m really hoping this will not only reduce a lot of the annoying bugs but also make the game more flexible.

It’s finally starting to look like these changes will allow for things like skipping work, staying up all night (either via an event or just not going to sleep), and maybe not even needing to be in the PC’s room in the morning. And this is on top of other planned features such as choosing who to hang out with during free events, being able to actively choose to visit the bartender, etc.

For those who are really curious, I’ll leave you with an image I shared on Discord, which was of what this new schedule looked like in an earlier state, before I started adding the actual code to it.