Progress Updates

Despite my apparent failure to maintain my "weekly devlog" plan so far, the last few weeks have seen some serious progress! Big steps include:

• Basic shop functionality all completed
• Quest system completed
• A lot more art assets in place
• Most key player menu functionality completed
• Back-end combat changes to make balancing easier

Dialogue Options

One new feature I'll get into a bit this time is the dialogue options. This game is being built in Ren'Py, which is a visual novel engine. Obviously it's being customized quite a bit to accommodate for the fact that most of the gameplay is not strictly visual novel, but the dialogue in particular has a lot room to take advantage of standard Ren'Py features. As a result, the engine supports some pretty powerful options to make dialogue more user-friendly. You'll see three options at the bottom in every dialogue scene:

Back

The "Back" option is, to me, the most notable. This game is modeled in many ways more on JRPGs than visual novels, and this isn't often an option in JRPGs, though I wish it was. At any point in dialogue, you can press the left arrow to go back. It's great if you miss something, or think you misunderstood something, or even just get overzealous in clicking and skip a bit of dialogue before you read it. 

Skip

The "Skip" option is much more standard. It's just what you'd expect: an option you can select (with a confirmation, so you don't do it by accident) if you want to jump through to the end of the current dialogue scene. It's a help if you reload and need to replay scenes, accidentally repeat dialogue you didn't mean to, or if you're just some kind of speed-run monster who wants to blast through to combat without having any idea what's going on.

Auto

The "Auto" option is one most people have probably run into before as well. At any point during dialogue, you can toggle "Auto" and you won't have to click from one line to the next. Instead, it'll auto-play with a short delay so you can read in a more passive, cinematic way. 

This is a dialogue-heavy game, so these options should help players engage with it in whatever way is most comfortable for them.