Free Game Idea and Donation Goal Reached

In a previous post I mentioned messing around with plenty of RAGs games and how they were filling my mind with all sorts of ideas. While not too many of the ideas were very relevant, I did settle on an interesting idea for a new RAGs game. Now before you get too excited, I'm just throwing this idea out there, I'm not planing on doing it myself. I just need to get it out there so it can stop occupying brain space.

So imagine a text based rpg in which you play as a woman who gets trapped in an alternate world where fatness denotes beauty and status. In order to survive you must gain weight to first of all not be mistaken for a slave, and then interact with a world that puts an unusually high emphasis on ones weight. You can climb your way up the social ladder by gaining weight and putting on certain appearances and interact with the right people. Or you can keep to particular low weight to take advantage of your physical prowess (over the heavier natives) and become a member of the society's under belly. I imagine themes between balancing your own needs and desires as to get ahead, but not lose oneself to hedonism and corruption (or perhaps head straight into it whole heartedly). End game could be finding a way back home or become a master of that new world.

This is something that can be done with just narrative, or as a RAGs game with visuals as well. I'm not going to pretend its a unique idea, but I think it's something that could be really cool and relevant to some people of our tastes. So have at it creative peoples, your are free to take the idea if you so wish, no credit is needed. Just share it so that others ( and me ) can enjoy.

In other news, I've just reached a donation milestone! Thanks to your generous donations I now have enough to purchase an Indie License of that Chat Mapper software I mentioned back a few posts ago. While I still have yet to get a good test drive of the software and build the necessary XML parser, I do have high hopes for integrating it with the project and using it as a solution to my dialog and event driving. I wont buy it until I'm certain it works, so for that case it doesn't work out, I'll be able to use the funds for something else. So thanks again for your attention and support, I'm still trucking along but I hope that my next few posts are filled with more exciting updates.

Screen Manager and Dialog Work

I've made a small amount of progress this weekend. I'm still deep into my re-factoring goals but I'm close to putting my ideas to the test. I've redone the Screen Manager to use a form of "Double Buffering" system. Previously, I held a reference to every possible screen all at once. Something around 10 fully loaded screens with initialized objects. I'm in the middle of testing holding no more than two screens at any moment. I have a single front buffer that displays the current screen and a back buffer that loads the next in coming screen as soon as it needs to. Once the back buffer is finished loading, it will fire off a command to swap buffers bringing it to the front while bringing the other to the back and safely unload it. This will take some testing to demonstrate the performance benefits but this may be best as each screen can now independently manage itself without the need for an all encompassing puppet master. This double buffer system has also given me ideas for possible transitions between screen which are commonly seen in Visual Novels.

The other system I'm working on that I'm pleased with is my new Dialog Window system. Before I treated Dialog Boxes as one off events with hard coded custom logic for which ever screens required it. Now I've developed a suite of common dialog boxes that all screens can readily spawn and customize. These include things such as Alerts, Confirmations, Input Boxes, as well as the main Dialog box. The real awesome part is that they can perform their job independently from a single function call and output the result to a single object. This is a vast improvement from the button nightmare I had before.

On the non-code front, I've been looking at bunches of different free erotic games for further inspiration for CGF. I ended up playing tons of RAGs games found on TFGames. While quite a few of those games are well made, and share some pretty interesting ideas; None seem to attempt to achieve what I'm trying right here in terms of scope and theme. Even so I might be pull some narrative ideas out and finally give an actual environment to CGF. I'll make sure to keep you guys posted.

Lazy Summer Steam Days

It's been another week and boy has it been an unproductive one. I was hoping on getting some work in on the weekend but with two Birthday parties and Steam Summer Sales nothing was going to get done. Hopefully by Wednesday I'll get Anno 2070 out of my blood and will myself to work. I'll let you guys know what actual progress gets done as soon as I accomplish something of note. Until then (or next week), later.

Designing, Planing and Less Coding

I've been trying to get around the whole lack of physical coding time by spending most of my downtime time just writing designs and code in a notebook. Hopefully this will end up saving tons of time for when I actually get a chance to do more work on my computer. I'm really happy with the architectural changes I've been making which is shape up to be a huge improvement. I think I have what I desired with screens utilizing a form of Model View Controller relationship. I've decided to use a combined Viewer and Controller relationship with custom models that are then attach. These individual screens will be self sufficient, and not rely on accessing pure Global variables. Before I had a separate manager that were running a muck changing code in too many different classes at once. The new screen manager will simply load and unload screens as needed and the dialog editor will actively drive the event logic for the screens. For example, when you enter town for the first time, you maybe greeted by an npc and share a small conversation. Later when you go back to town, the script will remember that you already had that conversation. This will work nicely for events that will happen in common areas, but the exact sequence of these dialogs will be managed all through the dialog editor. These scripts will be running on top of the primary farm game mechanics allowing for me to properly separate out the various levels of interaction. I still have quite a bit of planing to do, and I'm hoping I get more time to actually mash some code in, but I believe it's coming along nicely.

Looking at New Dialog Editor

In my last post I mentioned that I was looking for a good solution for my scripts and dialog woes. After some searching I came across something that might be just the trick. The software is called Chat Mapper, and it is a complete dialog designer and editor tool capable of exporting to a usable XML format. On the site you can take a peek at how the interface looks and has a couple of demonstrative demos.

I imagine using this will tool will provide a structure in which conversations can easily follow and progress with less hard-coding and mind twisting logic. I can see I would be able to separate two major aspects of the game (farm management and visual novel aspect) and run them in parallel oppose to being hopelessly intertwined. This tool may also allow other developers/writers to get involved without me having to build a separate complex application tool.

The immediate challenge is building a robust parser that understands the XML scripts. Unfortunately the trial version does not allow XML exports but there's an example XML file for me to look at on the site. If I'm able to get something I like out of that I may go ahead and purchase the Indie License. I might dip into my donations to pay for it, but I at least see that as a relevant and worthwhile investment for the project.

Progress Update

I've gotten around to doing some coding but it isn't anything too remarkable.The majority of the new refactored data classes have been framed out. There is now a distinct separation between the reference data and the dynamic game data. These classes now have a extra levels of abstraction that should aide in keeping the base data better encapsulated and less likely to run wild like they did last time.

Other than that I'm working on designing a new game text script manager as the last one was completely glued to a Global function call. I want a robust system that can handle dialog trees and work in parallel with state changing scripts. I'm pretty much at a loss for what to do at the moment, but I'm going to be reading up on a few articles that might provide some better insights.

And one more note for the Americans, happy Independence Day.