Weekly Report (Dec. 3rd)

Hey, everyone.

It was a very, very rough week for me, which left me completely drained. There's not much I've done in the grand scale of things to further the development. This isn't going to be a new version of the build. I'll mark it as CoFI-Demo-0.1.4a instead of CoFI-Demo-0.1.5.

I'll reserve CoFI-Demo-0.1.5 for when the Outside Church is done completely.

 Though not much has been done, there're some things worth mentioning:

- Adjusted the spaces between words and letters – now, at least in my opinion, the texts look neater and more compact;

- Looked through (read rewrote) all previous dialogue texts (again!) to make sure they looked alright visually with the new spaces – I have an unhealthy obsession with the texts looking ‘right’. For example, if there’s only one word in the last line, my brain literally hurts, and I artificially modify/outright rewrite the whole passage. Man, I wish I had an editor who would bonk me every time I tried to cram in something unnecessary just to occupy more space;

- Designed a tool to easily see how every string stored in a dialogue nod (neutral/famous/infamous - male/female) will be displayed during the dialogue mode – I’m still trying to find ways to streamline work with dialogues, and so far, working with them is far from ideal under the current system. While this tool is of no use to the players, it helps me immensely during the editing stage;

- Revised and implemented the texts for the post combat dialogue stage;

- Made a few minor changes to the code that I didn't even record - mostly adjustments and error handling to the current systems;

Like I said, this week was awful, so I just crammed in the revised texts. The player can basically choose the combat outcome (I haven't implemented the encounter itself) and then proceed to the dialogue branches. The fact that I had to revise the texts TWICE didn't help.

The thing is, I already have the draft versions of every dialogue there will be in the demo, unless I decide to add new branches, so whenever I say 'revise' instead of 'write', it basically means I edit the already existing dialogues as well as translate them into Russian (yes, they are written in English). This time, I first revised the dialogues, and only then noticed that the speakers/nods were out of sync. I wrote the dialogues way before I even started learning Unity, so naturally, I couldn't know that about a year and a half later I'd design a system that did not support the way I envisioned the dialogues back then. So this week, I had to not only rewrite about 40% of the nods (after already revising and translating them and getting them ready for implementation, which is when I noticed the problem), but also retranslate them into Russian. As a result, the texts are very uninspired, and even badly written at places.

I'll see if I can improve them next week. Also, next week I'm planning to wrap up the current location content and prepare for the next stage of the demo. I'll revise and implement some encyclopedia entries, polish the content in the Outside Church location, start preparing art for the next couple of locations, etc. Hopefully, the progress will be better and quicker compared to this week.

At least now I know that my dialogues may be out of sync, so I won't begin revising them before checking if all speakers/nods are matching, regardless of whether the nods are for neutral/famous/infamous characters. By the way, yes, I have to work on three variations of the dialogues. I'm starting to think that this game design decision wasn't a smart one, but oh well.

I haven't tested the build from game start, so I won't delete the previous build just in case.