Day 88
Now that the birthday magic has come and gone, life is returning back to normal...with me stuck in my eternal void of apparent nonexistence. I even had a live, in-person demonstration of what that looks like, right in my own household! So I spent a good portion of this week being too bummed out to really do anything, other than get addicted to a particular video game (and it was a demo that had no save mechanism, yet it took a couple whole days of real time to get through, so that's one titanic game).
The other weird thing, one of my early adopters had actually BEEN settled in Germany, who (as of Wednesday) reported that it was blocked by Steam. Talk about tough bricks.
Thursday, 7AM, let's see about drawing Violet's conversation with Scarlet in the bonus alternative Chapter 1-2.
OK, I guess it's harder than I thought. 7:15 and most of it was just spent rocking out. That's just part of the creative process. Not efficient, but that's not important here.
7:40 PM, just got 1 dialogue box done. Again, a lot of rocking out, and fooling with a very trending image generator online...very distracting. What should've taken about 10 minutes took 40.
8:45 AM, 1 hour or so later, and I got the whole dialogue written. I was bursting with laughter when I thought that 1) Violet has a plushie (because it's a very normal thing these days, girls AND boys like their plushies), and 2) Scarlet would playfully tease Violet about it, because siblings like messing with each other.
9:05 AM, INCIDENTALLY I also came to realize WHY Paradise Elementary is so empty in the game. It's Summer Vacation! Sure, the kids of the 2040s get only a week or 2 off instead of the 2 or 3 MONTHS we have now (because, you know, grim darkness), but point is, it's that recess time where all the kids are home, or traveling, or doing anything BUT serving their prison sentence for the crime of being young. There's a whole, nearly-finished story that tells how Scarlet gets a pass, but there are 2 key reasons: 1) she's a legally certified genius, and 2) school gave her PTSD. It's vaguely hinted at inside the Badass Bunker, but the video game does not go too deep to retreading that particular Short Bus episode. All you need to know is, it's part of the lore and part of what shapes Scarlet as a character. (And it's a reference to Apocalypse Now.)
9:45 AM, got 4 of these boxes done, plus the writing as mentioned before. Close to 3 hours (more like 2.5 after subtracting breaks).
9:50 AM, NOW we're making decent progress, since I got back into the groove. Sadly, I am worried about scheduling lunch. That aside, what I really like about Violet's character is that she's like a Tootsie-Roll Pop: there's a soft part to her, but you have to get through the hard part, first. It's adorable. And if it weren't for her Major Aggression Disorder or athletic talent thanks to genetics...she's actually 99% a NORMAL GIRL! Tomboy, sure, but culturally that still counts as "normal". I mean, like what Scarlet said in the diary: "What a Buttercup!"
10 AM, still good progress. Maybe about halfway (ish). And, I just think it's adorable that one of these sentient plush dolls is gushing over an in-universe, ACTUAL plush doll!
10:20 AM, just a handful more to go, and I'm taking a lunch break now.
10:45 AM, break's over. Here's hoping it didn't throw off my groove too hard.
11:20 AM, almost noon, and 3 left to go. After that, it's just implementing in the game engine. 4 hours (3 after subtracting breaks), sounds like a good day's work so far.
11:40 AM, 12 dialogue boxes done. And 2 more to go. 14 in a day's work, ideally...that's not bad.
12:20 PM, done all 14 now. Just need to get the file formats saved, and start putting it into the game engine. OH, and toilet break.
12:35 PM, break's over. There's still voicing that needs doing, but given all the effort so far, I think that can be done another day.
12:50 PM, game engine crash, and wiped the sprites I just added. At least the redundant sprites are here; just had to double-check. Happened when copying blocks of code from Drag-and-Drop. So, if I want to copy something over with my computer commands, I have to do it all manually. No keyboard wizardry this time.
1:05 PM, almost got done, and there was another semi-crash hiccup in the game engine with deleting an accidental sprite I didn't mean to make. At least now I've got the main chain done for the dialogue, so let's build and compile this thing, and see if it works.
First try, everything looks good! SO, just need to tweak the positioning a pinch since the bottom cuts off some of the boxes, but that aside, I should be getting ready to send this to you, and push the Dev Diary entry through all main channels.
One more thing. Since someone nicely pointed out that the previous Dev Diary went too fast to read through the new Diary boxes, let me show most of them now:
Though, testing showed me that I forgot to save the variable with the buttons and save/load like I've done with the Colonel from last time.
1:25 PM, something's not checking right with the dialogue. It works the first time, but never after that. Interesting enough, something inside the debug tools DOES allow me to force the variable to a number I want it to be at, for testing. Very cool!
Whatever is happening, F9 (reload) is failing to clear the global variable for Violet's dialogue. Crap, more debugging time.
Seems like the Colonel is having the same problem. Testing both dialogue variables, and F9 is not flipping them to 0 (the last intended state). The break point for debugging is not activating either, meaning the code is just ignoring that part entirely.
Guess I need a persistent, dedicated F5 or F9 object to follow Scarlet around.
1:40 PM, the breakpoint is working now, with the separate object responding by freezing the game (that's what "Breakpoints" do: they tell the game to just stop once this particular piece of code is run, meaning that if the game does NOT freeze, that means the computer is just ignoring that code). MEANING, I guess poor little Scarlet has a few TOO many commands in her F9 and F5 blocks, so we'll delegate some of those to a separate, invisible object that's also persistent so it's always with her.
1:45 PM. It's working now. So, just let me get that video up, and get ready for some other plans today (such as exercise).
Here is today's video:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1oKqDwDro6GEcsL8zmL_L7m1VvAdE5J3w/view?usp=sharing
With that, all should be done and ready to go.
Jay