Right now, while there are some small things to change or add in the code (especially the character portrait system) but the big push will be writing out characters and dialogue! It'll be a broad demo so I'll be taking some of the archetypes from my research for these first characters.

Slow downs in my pace have still occured and while it's great to focus on the minutia sometimes (it's kept this from turning into a cancerous code base) I need to really just get a demo out there to start play testing.

Honestly that is one of my biggest weaknesses in coding. I like to know systems in and out, that's why I created a custom visual novel engine. But sometimes you need to just grab something that works well, get the hang of it, and slap it in place. Scroll view has it's issues but works well enough.

Usually, when I make a new system I create some custom dialogue to show it off and with the new dialogue it's started to run off screen! I knew this would happen so I dug into unity's scroll view system. Usually I don't care for their more complicated prefabs cause I don't have control over them.

It was a nice way to kill a slow day at work and it's been fun watching the board develop over time. I'm not hugely into chess and I'm certainly not very good at it but I might post just a daily picture of the chessboard or something. I'm always curious about which of my neighbors chose which team.

In the future I may also go back and create another child to handle the intro auto-dialogue but for now there are tasks that are just a lot more critical to manage. Such as the interest system! kinda crazy I went this far without including it since it's core to the puzzle of the game.

But with the creation of now 3 custom dialogue types (intro auto-dialogue, standard choice dialogue, and end game dialogue) it was getting way too noisy to include all the exceptions in just the base script so I ended up creating a child to handle the end dialogue.

In the process of making this though I went back to an old problem I kind of ignored in the past. If possible I want to avoid breaking down the universal dialogue script into lots of little children just so I don't have to go and edit a ton of stuff every time I change something.

Also with the new tools I provided to the writer we're probably going to have to coordinate a lot more on what we'll need for the prototype. I designed the dialogue systems for Noir Wingman to be accessible to non-coders but that's easier said than done coming from a programmer.

This new pace feels good and hopefully, with Halloween festivities out of the way, I can use the momentum to keep cracking through the systems and writing I need to get done. Highest priority is the patience system, to give players a challenge in the game, but I also want to rework the spite code.

For the first time I didn't post last week. I ended up getting incredibly sick and had to call out of work and stay in bed. Despite being sick, I accomplished more the last two weeks than the rest of the month. I finished the design for the end level selection and wrote up a guide for the writer.

Speaking of this month will be finishing out the suitor system! That and spending time with my writer to knock together some characters for a demo cause it's nearly in a playable state! The two major things are the selection and patience system and the patience system can come after some early tests

In short the additions here are completely redoing how the intro dialogue is handled, adding character position and character name options, a hell of a lot of debugging and adding in the suitor selection system, though that last one is very wip

For now we're in an almost prototypable state so while my writer starts putting together characters for a demo, I'll work on the patience and selection system. Patience should be easy enough but I'm worried the selection will end up nest of worms I'll spend a month on.

I built a to-do list which I think I'll need at this point to keep on track with exactly what needs to be done at what priority. Usually I'd reserve things like this for a sprint log for a bigger team but hopefully it'll help with my distractability.