After over a week of trying to make all my bits of code agree and finding out my VBA experience was actively screwing me over on something in GDScript, My saving system works!
It's objectively terrible, so I won't talk about it much, but I used a lot of Packed Scenes. to save the scenes for various things whole.
Some of these can easily be saved with less data, but I fear the whole thing will topple down soon.
My reward: WRITING!
I'd already written a little bit during breaks, but it's now a good time to talk about the VN/dialogue plugin i'm using: Dialogic!
It's very user friendly and clean, and exports everything in plain text files for external editing if needed.
All the components are drag-and-drop! so once you have your UI set up, the rest clicks into place.
My biggest niggles with VNs are things I'm trying to write against:
- I hate stressing over options, so I want to make multiple options that are all fun in their own way. There is no optimal dialogue option!
- I hate the trudge of replaying a VN for other routes, especially when I just wanna see everything in the other routes, and if this is a desktop companion then a rolling worldstate is important. All routes can happen simultaneously, and everyone is chill with it.
Number 2 has been partially informed by me mulling over a title
- Keep 'Untitled Catboy Game'
- Catboy Haver (in-joke)
- Catboy Sanctuary (too serious)
But then a cursed though flew over my head
- My Partner Died of Old Age, and All I Got Was This (Shitty) Catboy Polycule
Which is really funny to me. I'm not sure if I'll stick to it, but it informed the vibe.
These cats are immortal, abandoned, magical familiars stuck in a Sanctuary. Of course they will get bored. Of course relationships will form.
I just think hitting this with the "fuck it, we ball" laser is... fun! I love it when relationships form in the background of the player's, so I think this will add a layer to this.
What the hell am I making???