Day 13
Turns
My limited coding time yesterday was mostly spent on getting turns to work. Because I have so much to deal with, and all of it intersects in one way or another, it's quite easy for me to switch between tasks - at least in this point in development. I can't get storytext to work until turns work, and I can't get turns to really "work" until storytext works. So... yesterday was turns.
And, guess what! I actually have turns working now!
To some extent, anyway. It's buggy, you receive very little input from AI for some reason, and it doesn't
always seem to work - but that's to be expected at this stage of development. Right now, what I have would constitute a Pre-Alpha. However, you
can finish turns (sort of - it doesn't ask for answers to Requests from WITH actions). Outcome when winning/losing isn't implemented yet, either, so you're just playing an infinite broken game.
BUT! I'm getting there, one step at a time.
Requests aren't in yet for a very simple reason: They're horribly complicated to work out. I'm not actually sure how I'm going to get them to function properly.
See, when a player chooses a WITH action, it's supposed to send a request to the other player involved - the one they want to do the action with. But when do you do that? Do you wait until they've finished their actions? What if the turn ends before they finish? And what if multiple people request something of that person? I'd have to stagger the requests. I'm not entirely sure how to get it to work properly, but I have some ideas.
On another note, related to turns:
Something I always intended to talk about was the turn setup, and how Taiya chose which options you received. (Before you ask, no, she does it without any bias toward fondness/how much she likes people.
) She tries to figure out which options you would be most likely to choose - based on what you've chosen before, your stats, and your skills - and then lists them all in order from most likely, to least likely (with some degree of randomness, so you can't always choose what you want). Then she has a chance of removing the item on the top of the list - making it so it's less likely to get
exactly what you want. What's left is a pseudorandom list of four items that you'd (hopefully) really like to get - meaning that you really have to think about the choices you're given.
Options and choices in games are a fundamental part of what makes them enjoyable. Naturally, I want to make sure that I give the players difficult decisions to make so they have to really consider all the possibilities.
storytext: 279 lines
(+1)
file length: 1230 lines
(+3)
percentage of file that is storytext: 23%
percentage of minimum complete: 80%
(+1%)
percentage of optimum complete: 7%
(Also, should I do an "overall progress" bar too? Would take more time/effort, but could be interesting, I suppose.)