Start of blog

I'm not sure if I'm going to keep going with this, but the point of this blog is to write about my progress on the game I'm making for my comic Club Love. Since some people are waiting impatiently for the next part, I thought they might be interested in reading about how close I am to finishing the game. Or if someone's curious about how I made the game, they might be interested. But I don't want to spoil anything so don't expect a lot of previews or anything.

Since posting the first part of the game, all I've done is made a dialogue parser so that it will be easier to add dialogue to the game in the future. Previously I added dialogue as XML, like this:

<dialogue>
<talk source="right" type="static">
<speakers> <right>Cora</right> <left>Molly</left> </speakers>
<text>What are you doing?</text>
</talk>
<talk source="left" type="static">
<speakers> <right>Cora</right> <left>Molly</left> </speakers>
<text>I’m trying to figure out what to write my English paper about.</text>
</talk>
<talk source="right" type="static">
<speakers> <right>Cora</right> <left>Molly</left> </speakers>
<text>Good luck...</text>
</talk>
</dialogue>

XML is useful like that, but it's a pain to type all of that every time. So my new method takes a string like this:

<dialogue>
*Add Cora (C) on right; Add Molly (M) on left;
C: What are you doing?;
M: I'm trying to figure out what to write my English paper about.;
C: Good luck...;
</dialogue>

And parses it to get out the information needed to display the dialog. It's not perfect - like I can't get it to split on newlines for some reason, so I split on ; instead - but it's more convenient than what I did for the first part. It's also possible to Move and Remove speakers, and to change their expressions. If anyone's interested in the code for this let me know, I'll be happy to share it with you. I was inspired by this program, which I recently discovered: http://www.renpy.org/.

Anyway, I still have a lot more to do before I can post the next part of the game. Here's the list:

• Script
• E and L’s powers
• CL-clothes sprites, faces
• Rob and Julie sprites, faces
• Amy sprite, faces
• Some more NPCs (2 in art room, one in hallway?)
• Room builder?
• Main hallway, art room (2 sections)
• Keyboard control – leaving screen, “moonwalking”, doors, party members
• Minigame mechanics and art
• Putting it all together

As I check stuff off the list I'll post it to this blog (unless I decide that it's a waste of time...) so you can all see how close I am to being done.

Oh by the way, if you want to know more about how I dealt with some aspect of the game, post a comment and I can write a little bit about it. (Not a lot! I'm not going to waste a ton of time blogging when I should be actually working on the game!)