Week 7: Quests
I can’t rightly say this was a particularly difficult week for work—not to last week’s extent—but it was a long one. Because of how behind last week was, I got a late start on this week’s work as well. The focus for this week, building on last week’s outline, was to implement the first few quests and make additions to the world as needed for them. A couple of late nights allowed me to put together the functionality for the first three, which comprises half of the game’s critical path.
In the first work session, I took care of a little bit of technical debt, making improvements on small-but-notable quirks of past work. This included speeding up the text box fade in and fade out animations, showing a clearer highlight on selected quests in the quest log and making the menu opaque, and rearranging the dialogue boxes to show both NPC dialogue and player responses at the same time. With that taken care of, I took on the slightly more substantial task of implementing the first task. I needed to move and add to the village quite a bit to make room for four NPCs, as the first quest requires meeting each of them. While the first two quests are both pretty similar to the demo quests of weeks past, I opted to rewrite them from the ground up, both to preserve functionality in previous weeks for posterity (for now) and to build them exactly as I need them now. The greatest challenge was making quest indicators work as I wanted. Nearly half of the time from this session was spent on them, and to summarize: quest indicators only update when a quest or quest entry state is updated, so running only with variables prevented them from updating to reflect that the player had spoken to an NPC. With this determined, I started work for the second quest, but didn’t get far before I had to rest.
The second work session focused on the completion of the second quest and the implementation of the third. I went through a few different ideas about how to deal with the most complex part of the quest: repairing the bridge. I made a pull request part way through so I could use a script, but ended up encountering roadblocks which would have made it more complex. Vacillating on this decision ended up delaying progress by a while, but I finally managed to figure out sequences—a hanging point from last week—enough to use them for the brief scene. The third quest still needs a little bit of attention. While it is functional, the quest marker on the relevant NPC is inconsistent, and the forest I added as its main location is lacking in much to do. I don’t think it would be inherently a bad thing to have a few quests which do boil down to “go get the thing and bring it back,” but I want to have some puzzles which don’t exist in the cave to the north. Either way, I finally completed the week’s work, made a second pull request (which also contained no script changes) and recorded the video a few days later.
