Day 1 - Scramble and wire

Day 1 had its fair share of interruptions. Although technically not over yet, I have my sister's birthday celebration coming up tonight and I still need to bake her her vegan chocolate cake and cook her a vegan soup. Vegan chocolate cake is actually quite delicious. It's basically just powdered sugar and vegan approved chocolate and the end result is something that tastes like diabetes and is incredibly thick and heavy.

I digress.

So, the first day has mostly been spent pulling mechanics and assets from my Godot test environment project and re-wiring them. It's good for review for someone like me who hasn't got all this memorized and can't just pound out code without an example to work from.I was also able to set up a new mechanic I haven't used before: the light radius. I haven't gotten into adding occlusion to objects yet, but I did (finally) manage to figure out how to have both my light radius node visible without making my dialogue node invisible. The solution is to set everything in the dialogue node layer to a different Light Mask layer in Inspector -> Visibility.

I have my Player Character framework, point-and-click movement and animations, the NPC and other interactable frameworks, the main menu and options menus (with resolution options and audio options - although I don't know how to wired up the audio effectively yet), the pause function, and the fade-in and fade-out mechanics established. While the dialogue mechanic is set up, I still haven't quite gotten branching dialogue figured out or if I even really need to. I also want to implement a sort of "inventory" system, but for the sake of the game's scope, it doesn't need to be any more complicated than checking if a player has actually picked up an item and is considered to be in possession of it.

I use placeholder graphics and fonts to help me visualize what the end product will look like. The model I'm using for the Player Character and the NPCs is the character Prior from the game La Pucelle Tactics. I feel like I need to stress that the pixel art for the character is not mine and is not reflective of what to expect for the end product.

At this point, I am here:

I will likely fiddle with the light radius size as more custom assets are represented. The door is merely a testing apparatus for changing rooms. I am only using Nodes and 2 scenes for the game so far: the main menu and the game, itself. This saves me coding time because instead of changing scenes and having to write up a bunch of extra stuff to keep track of everything, I can just use my fade-in and fade-out transition to hide that all that is really happening is that some nodes are being hidden while others are being made visible. This may change if I have time to include cinematics.

While it would be super cool to "animate" the light radius to give a flickering effect since the light source is supposed to be a candle, that's going to be on the lower priority of the polish stage. I should, however, try experimenting with occlusion before adding flickering. Both combined, I think, would create a great effect, but I don't have any actual experience with that so I'll have to see when I get there.

Next steps? I'm not 100% I think it's important at this stage to get some pixel art done for the characters and the setting so I can get a better idea of what things will actually look like. I still need to get the dialogue and script written up which is turning out to be more difficult than I first imagined because writing dialogue ahead of knowing how the game plays and feels is difficult for me to imagine. I *have* already come up with some symbolism I want to include in the pixel art, though. Film making 101: show, don't tell.  I am super worried that I won't be able to get to sound and implementing it effectively in time. I do have lots of time, though. Even with all the time I have, I still feel the stress because I don't have the experience to know how to structure the rest of that time and when I should be doing what.

Right now, it feels like the art needs some attention first. If I can see where I am and what the characters look like and the structure of the Abbey, then I will feel more prepared to construct a story therein. I also feel that at this point, I should be focused on creating a "complete" experience of at least having a player able to walk around, explore objects, and talk to npcs. Once that is done, then I can start considering an inventory system and maybe some puzzle elements. I think my priority is to make an interactive fiction that tells a story and to attempt to implement symbolism into the pixel art environment.

For now, though, I need to look up the recipe for lentil soup for my sister's birthday.