Spring 2022

I just put out release 0.8 in my never ending quest to dominate the world! Well, the first half of that sentence is correct. I spent some time looking over my early code and compared it to where I’m at now. There’s been such a big improvement that I had to take a moment to feel some pride in pushing myself to learn more and attempt to use that knowledge to produce a better product. In the latest release I put an active script that allows players to view basic character information for all of the games NPCs. There were a lot more than I realized. I know for many users it can become confusing remembering all of their names and how they are related/connected to other characters in the game. So, this has been a long time coming. It’s very bare bones for a beta release. However, I have plans to make it prettier over the next two game updates.

All of these things are even more significant considering that once On Distant Shores has been wrapped up, I intend to immediately jump into a new game. Everything I’ve learned will be there for the initial release. Hopefully making it a more polished and perhaps just as important a more modular effort. If I’ve learned anything it’s that creating everything in a modular fashion, making it easier to insert new things as needed makes for a far more code friendly game from a development perspective.

Another big lesson learned is to be far more generous with my use of variables attached to game selections. They need to be plentiful so every single minor detail the player selects will have at least one variable tied to it. The variables need to have a good naming convention that is adhered to. This way it is easy to make calls back to them when future decisions and events that are controlled by player decisions are sure to go off properly. Another learned lesson is to not bother to assign a variable name to every image in the script. The engine is designed to simply acknowledge them by their filename. So, stick to easy to remember file names that also adhere to a good naming convention to make that much easier. Which gives the advantage of not having to put so much into the initialization script.

The final lesson learned for this post is to have a much better phone script. I had to spread scripts across so many different things (doors, phone, laptop, etc) because I didn’t make the phone script modular enough. If I had planned it better from the beginning I could have had the character information screen completely tied into the phone. In my next game (depending on the time period it happens in) I will have a phone or similar always on/always selectable feature to allow the user to peruse useful information at anytime, from the very beginning.

Well, until next quarter, I want to express my gratitude for somehow being brave enough to put this game out and more importantly to have people who play it and enjoy it. It’s been a wonderful ride so far.