Starting Over

So it’s time for another one of those “lots of work being done, but nothing to show for it” posts…

Interns: Do-Over

As you know, if you’ve been following development, I was last working on a rebuild/reorganization of the parts of the game that handle the schedule and event management.

You might not recall, though, that a while back, Discord member Twi offered me some coding assistance with the game. Well, noticing my posts on the topic and having recently come into a large block of free time, Twi returned to the scene having finally gotten the proposed “timelog” system working.

The general idea of the timelog is that it creates a searchable database of interactions and activities that the player character has had, along with when and where. Twi has taken this even further by building a scene-picker loop that can use the criteria for choosing which scenes to play next.

Given the opportunity, I put what I was doing on hold to assist with the creating of a new build of Interns using this new system. Twi knows Python far better than I do but isn’t familiar with the idiosyncrasies of Ren’Py. (Not that I’m an expert, but I have years of familiarity with it.)

I was tasked with attempting to gut the existing game as much as possible so that it would contain the bare minimum required to keep all of the images and user interface, but as little of my original scripting as possible. The scenes have all been removed, and Twi has begun the process of porting the intro and first day of the internship into the new build, using the new system.

As Twi has expressed interest in tackling some of the other mechanics of the game (and has already been rebuilding inebriation and tanning systems), I figured it would be best to take the opportunity to organize many of my notes on my plans for the game (both things that currently exist and were planned for the future) and assemble them into a document that would (hopefully) make sense when read by another person.

It’s actually been a tougher process than I expected, as many of my notes are scattered through years of scripts for story events (a problem that came about due to jotting down ideas when and wherever I had a free moment).

To help familiarize myself with this new way of doing things, Twi has asked that I work on porting Day 2 of the internship over to the new build, so I’ll need to start on that once I have my “design document” completed.

Future Hurdles

I’m cautiously optimistic about this new build so far, but at the same time, I know that this has only been made to work for a part of the mostly-linear intro to the game. The first real challenges appear on Day 3 and Day 4, where the job system first appears and some of the really more complicated branching scenes show up.

And even those are minor in comparison to the real nightmare that begins on Day 5, where we enter the main schedule loop (the part of the game I’ve been trying to rebuild recently). So, if nothing else, it should be interesting to see what Twi has to propose for handling it. 😅

Other Stuff

Possibly Helpful Plug-ins?

In graphics news, I’ve been investigating some studio plug-ins and think I may have found a pair that might help making the avatar images just a little bit easier.

To create these, I’ve made dozens of variations of the PC at different body sizes, pale and tan versions, eye colors, hair colors, hair lengths, tan lines, etc. (and that’s not even getting into clothes). Once I’ve created the pose and lighting, I need to manually load each of those individually, switch them in place of the existing model, and save an image to edit in Photoshop.

The promise of these new plug-ins is that they made be able to handle the loading, swapping, and image-saving part of the process automatically.

It certainly doesn’t do everything for me, but it sounds like it could eliminate many hours of tedium, which would be a huge plus in my book.

What’s Next?

As you can imagine, all of this still leaves me in a weird spot as far as what to present to you as something to play with. I’m considering doing a band-aid patch-up of the existing game and at least throwing in a few more scenes (though you’ll still have all the bugs from before…plus whatever new ones are included due to what I’ve been working on).

I still have some additional characters for the wallpaper series that haven’t debuted, so I can try to get another set of those presentable.

There’s always the option of releasing the current version of the timelog build of the game…but I think it’d be indistinguishable from the original, save for getting inexplicably drunk on Day 1 and then having things abruptly end. 😉