Just so you all know, I am planning to participate in the PirateSoftware game jam~ It won't be anything naughty, but I'll deffo be giving you guys the product of that work~! 

Next month I will be back on three days to port full tilt!

Hello everyone! I got the prototype running pretty smoothly!!!

In this version of the game there is a little scene with Rahlle on the farm, and features two new images as well~ This is intended as a technical demonstration of the systems I have been working on to create the text adventure portion of Three Days to Port in Godot! As such, it's not exactly pretty, and is more to show off what I have gotten working so far~

The systems I have developed make the coding of text adventure scenes much more simple and easy to manage than they are in Quest, though, there are still some pretty steep technical hurdles to overcome. Right now though I've written a custom dialogue system! I will be looking for ways to improve it if I can, and if I can't, then I will be exploring some pre-built dialogue system options.

I will keep you updated as I continue working on this project~

During April I have done some more research and development with Godot with the express intention of bringing the game into that engine. That said, Godot isn't at all built to do text adventure stuff out of the box like Quest is, so! I have spent a lot of this month figuring out good ways to do text processing!

One of the major issues I have had with Quest is. I kind of write a lot. There might be enough text between choices that, that text will more than fill up the screen if I presented it to you all at once, and you would have to scroll up and figure out where the old text stopped and the new text starts! 

So, any of you who have played the game will know that I tend to present it to you about 2 paragraphs at a time! I do it that it will nearly never push all the text off the screen! But, to do that in quest, I have to hard code that. Every. Single. Time. Quest only really supports 'do this until you are done and then proceed' within the wait function, which anything you want that to wait for needs to be nested inside of that wait function. So, it's not really like I can build some automated way to split up and manage the text within quest, and basically the more I write, the more difficult the code of the game gets to work with, because every two paragraph section needs to be nested perfectly within the wait of the previous one, and any choices or other code that needs to happen at a particular time in that sequence also needs to be nested perfectly within that structure.

Basically, the only real solutions I see to this problem are,

1. DEAL WITH IT
Continue spending a ton of time needing to check and double check the sequences to be sure everything is flawless

2. WRITE LESS
Which, well maybe some people would want, and this would be easier on me, but I like the writing, and I hope that you do too!

3. FIND AN ALTERNATIVE SOLUTION
I've been wanting to learn Godot so that I could work in a more proper coding language that supports the kinds of things I want to do with it. IN TRUTH I could probably still do what I want within quest, but I would need to learn to use Javascript and build what I want to do outside of quest and hook it in. It's basically like, I'm gonna have to learn a whole new way of doing things either way. But pursuing Godot is like, not only can it do the stuff I want, it can do other stuff, and has bigger better support for doing graphical stuff, and I don't have to worry about the 20 MB file size limit!

SO! I am aiming for option 3, and this month I spent figuring out and developing a system which I can throw basically an unlimited amount of text at, which the system can split up into paragraphs and present them to the player 1 paragraph at a time, while also having the capacity to do that until it is done, and then proceed within a wider code block. To test this I threw all 11 pages of text from the Amilyn encounter at it, and it chewed through that flawlessly!

ALL THAT SAID THOUGH, I was hoping to be a little further along than I am. While I do have the text processor working well, I do not have a way to present choices to the player yet. This should come together pretty quickly now, but I am reluctant to present a SNEAK PEEK until I have all the bones of the text adventure created and working nice and smooth together. With the text processor working as well as it is though, the thing that I thought was going to be the hardest thing for making this is done.

Over the next few days I am going to be trying to make a system that can dynamically create buttons to be used for the text adventure options. From there, I think I will try to create the Three Days to Port intro sequence! And when I have gotten that far, I will be posting it up here~

Thank you very much for your patience and support~

Hello everyone !

I return from my my DEN OF LEARNINGS ON TIME

With a completed videogame!

https://turbulent-stars.itch.io/mouse-quest

You can play it in the browser here, or download it to play on your machine. I should note that there have been a few issues reported in testing with the browser version, and I am not sure how to resolve those, so! If you have some issue, consider downloading it~ It seems to work correctly for me on firefox though!

Anyway, this is a very smol game, only a few minutes long, and I hope you will enjoy it! This is a really old idea I had that I thought would be fun, but that, at the time, I didn't really see a reality where anyone actually downloaded or played it when I thought about making it in RPG maker. It's just a silly little idea.

Though, I've come to really enjoy making games, and have been wanting to learn how to use Godot, so! I dusted off the idea and made it! 

I will be continuing to use Godot to make more games in the future too, though probably not at such an intense schedule! I learned a lot though! (And I could probably make the same game again in a lot less time now so that's good at least!)