dev diary: i'm in flowchart hell

i was debating writing a post this week because i just haven't wanted to stop working on night with timber, but i've been coding the timelines screen and feeling FED UP with how long it's taking, so i came to complain about it.

under the hood

in BAD END THEATER i placed all the buttons individually using xpos/ypos, it looked like this

i remember this being extremely tedious. especially because i had to figure out the best way to lay out the timeline in a way that made sense and was easy to navigate, there were a lot of branches that run into each other and augghghhh it was hard to think about, i don't think i was able to represent every possible path either so i had to make concessions, but having this feature really helped both to sell the game and for people to not get lost in the routes and be able to finish all the endings more easily

I WANT... PEOPLE TO SEE EVERYTHING IN NWT TOO...

so i was like "ok we're not hardcoding these positions again, how about i use boxes this time"

it's working out...

the lines between the scene buttons are individual images like this:

so i can plug in the right parts instead of the way i did it in BET which is just... one image overlaid over all the buttons lol. or... actually oh my god i had to make a highlighted version of the lines for endings youve gotten, so it was more like 10 overlapping images per character

IM NOT HIGHLIGHTING THEM FOR NWT YOU CAN'T MAKE ME, but i did highlight the romance ones pink since.. the game only gives you flirty options if you hit on him at the start... so they had to be differentiated

anyway the timeline images are working just fine, but to get the positioning right for the branches further from the center, i have to do stupid shit like this

so many null widths... i just plug em in and reload and alter and reload and move things and aughgghhh

i complain but it's worth it for timber

i'm legit having such a great time making this game, i'm very motivated to get a build out and i feel like i'm closing in on one... although ive been saying that for many days now.... there's too much to do, there's 70 images in the cg folder and i would imagine it counts for maybe half of them...... here's one as a treat

sorry i thought i'd be posting syrup 2 updates this month, but i am not!!!! i can only think about timber!!!! it's my curse. WIP build is coming as soon as possible, i mean it........

thanks for reading <3