A little working example ...

This is nothing more than a little bit of showing off(!), but please allow me to toot my own horn for a moment and share a little example with you of exactly what I mean when I say I've been working my ass off on the underlying systems behind the game.

Hopefully the following will give you more of an idea of the kind of thing I've been doing with this huge refactor/rewrite of the code itself, and how it'll drastically improve the speed at which I can make new content in the future.

So even up until the last/currently live version of the game - 0.4.1 - a lot of the things I'd be doing were 'hard coded' in. It was the only way at that point I knew how to work. Take adding in a new character in a location. I'd have this huge-ass string of code I'd need to write, the equivalent of "If it is sunday and if the player has clicked this certain option and it is night time and ..." and I'd be writing that all (in code) for each specific use case.

Well, now I have a one-and-done 'character schedule' where I can set where/when/who for all the npcs, and then just update that (in game) day by day. I was just working on adding the Secretary back into the game, and it struck me just how easy I'd made it for myself in this new version, so I thought I'd record a little gif to show you just what I meant!! [It's super low res when embedded in this post like this, but if you right click the gif itself and select 'Open image in new tab' it gets a little easier to see what's going on!]

Like, that's basically it. That's all I need to do to add a completely new character to a scene going forward (other than making the images and adding in some conversation options). I realize the gif is super low res, but in case you're interested, I'm just adding "secretary" to the player's 'npc_locations - reception_desk' dictionary and the game is now taking care of the rest!

It actually took even less time than the above gif, because it's running kinda slow for some reason ...

So, yeah, that's just one short example of the kind of stuff I've been doing on this new version. It might seem like nothing huge has changed from the outside when you're playing (although I hope it seems a little slicker and more intuitive to play), but underneath everything has been streamlined and optimised, so that I can honestly just be focussing on the CONTENT with all the future updates I mentioned in the last post.

Can't wait to share it with you!!

Dana x