It's been a very slow month for the project. I've had a lot of other things I've had to deal with, and my motivation has been pretty low. However, the one big thing I did was deal with the conversation question form the last blog post. I ended up going with fluid dialogue. It was a bit of work to rip out my custom dialogue system and replace it with fluid, but I have to say it's nice to not have to worry about it anymore. Fluid does pretty much everything I need and is much easier to edit than my original code method, though it's still not perfect. I will have to make some modifications and extensions myself to fluid locally which is a bit annoying, but there's no way around it. The main thing I need is a way to hook into conversation choices and run arbitrary functions afterwards. I need this right now actually, for the demo. After speaking to a character and exiting the conversation by a certain path I need that character to move somewhere. It shouldn't be too hard, after all, fluid has some docs on customising the system, but my progress has been very slow due to my current lack of motivation.
What's been killing my motivation is the lack of easy and clear steps to take now. I know sort of what needs to be done, but I haven't managed to build a clear path in my mind of how to get there and what to do along the way. This is bad for the conversations especially because writing huge amounts of dialogue on the fly is hard for me and mistakes are complicated to fix. Using fluid's dialogue editor, I can't find/replace all instances of a word if I change a character's name or something later on, as an example. I think I need to find some way to write my dialogues down outside of my game so I can run through them, see how they all interact, and make changes on the fly quickly without having to hard code them clunkily into Unity.
I might have to do some research into how other RPG style games go about their writing. I'm sure this has been done many times by many teams who have had the exact same problems I'm having.
Anyway, hopefully soon I'll have something to show. If I get totally stuck on the conversation stuff again, I might switch to doing spritework or something for a bit to make some progress.
