Edge cases ...

Tell me to shut up if these (almost) daily status updates are getting annoying, but it's been kinda fun to document my process and helps me keep focussed. Plus I feel it's good to keep you all in the loop. But honestly, if I should cool it down a bit, just let me know! 

So today I wanted to talk about 'edge cases' - which could be defined as "a situation or input value that is not typical or common and may require special handling in a program algorithm". In Girl Games, these seem to come up quite a lot! 

Take the rewrite I'm doing of the second big Heather scene - where she takes you shopping for a bra and wig. In previous versions, when we got to the part where you're trying on the bras in the fitting room, I'd kinda hard coded it in: a whole function written just to loop through a specified array of [black bra, white bra, pink bra], and the array was populated with whatever bra 'items'/resources I'd generated at runtime. Which was ... fine. 

But I wanted there to be more options and to handle the trying on of clothes during cut scenes (and also maybe in future shopping situations, when you feel brave and femme enough to take some dresses or whatever into a fitting room to try before you buy!) in a slightly better way. 

These days, some stores in Girl Games have changing stock. If you went into Victoria's Secret on a Tuesday, there might be different bras available to Wednesday or whatever. It's a tiny little thing, but I like the idea of the stores having little surprises when you check back. Sometimes the stock is randomised and I intend to add in special rare 'one-offs' too (although that isn't implemented just yet). 

So yeah, instead for this version of Heather's scene, I wrote a whole new function for 'trying on' clothes (that works during the cut-scene display), where you can cycle through and try on a certain type of clothing (in this case first bras, then later wigs), and pick from whatever was in stock in that store on that day! 

Then of course there's a whole other function to write - that adds whatever you chose to a seperate secret 'girl games outfit' inventory, so that we can keep track of whatever outfit you slowly put together. Plus of course the store assistant offers you matching free panties to whatever color bra you chose, which is ANOTHER function to write, etc, etc. 

All this as for an 'edge case' situation where you try on a bra and get offered panties too, and which a player will race past in a couple of clicks, most likely without even thinking about what went on behind the scenes. 

Part of me knows that I could approach all this in a much more simplistic way - that I could just hard code a simple scene a-la Twine, with three choices: Choose the black bra, choose the pink bra, choose the white bra (or whatever) and the outcome would be almost the same. Hell, maybe nobody would notice the difference. 

But then the game wouldn't be working exactly how I wanted - and I'm having so much fun making this the crossdressing game of my dreams! I'm just glad that at least you guys are happy to come along for the ride too! x