Recoding the battle system...

I'm currently rewriting the Das Minneschwert battle engine almost entirely... What a pain. But the old code was buggy, massive, redundant, and impossible to maintain, so here I go. At the moment, the engine can

1. choose the correct turn order based on each character's speed,
2. prompt the user for input if it's a PC's turn,
3. and allow the PC to attack (damage) an enemy.

Selecting an enemy to attack is something I forgot to implement right away, so poor Latte attacks himself in the demo (lol).
I feel happiness that I'm finally able to do the things I want to do with computer programming.

Das Minneschwert improvements

Since I'm already working myself half to death on schoolwork, I figured I might as well go whole hog and almost entirely re-code Das Minneschwert's engine from scratch. It certainly looks and runs a lot better now, though! Hahaha.

There's now a function that notifies you of stuff like acquired money or changes to the main quest's objective.

The pause menu is less stupid now! It even has a message for when the party is empty. There is also now an inventory system, although the player doesn't acquire any items in this demo.

Profanity is optional, just in case some players don't want it. I can dig.

If you DO have people in your party, it looks like this!

And here's what happens when you click the text button to look at a character's status.

The original pause/status screen code was written literally the night before screen language was implemented in Ren'Py (seriously, I stayed up all night to code, then headdesked when I saw what was new that morning), so I was never pleased with it. This is a lot cleaner, and has a more solid Python base as well.

Now I just need to finish the battle code...hahaha...

Desktop demo

At present, this is the player's "desktop" in Project Apple Knights. It took a surprising amount of effort just to make it look like this. Icons from Oxygen Refit 2, which is listed as LGPL.

ItC development log 21-9-11

I've implemented some new cosmetic features. The in-game desktop actually looks like somewhat like a real desktop now -- it has various icons for (presumably) other applications, as well as a rudimentary NPC-controlled cursor to make it clear when different programs are being started. There is also a nice "shut down" button in the corner to quit the game if you so desire. The latest version of Ren'Py, 6.13.0, seems to fix the time recognition bug I described previously.

ItC: IRC nick implemented!

Thanks to this thread, I found a workaround so that the player's username will display as their nick during IRC segments. (NVL mode and dynamic names are hard to work with...)

“Across the Night to You” 1.0 released!

Although I originally intended to release this for Tanabata, it's only now that it's complete...(Well, the lunar calendar put the 7th day of the 7th month sometime in mid-August, so it's fine I guess.)

ETA: IMPORTANT! I have fixed some errors in the game and compiled a 1.1 release. Consequently the links in this post no longer work. Please proceed to the linked 1.1 release if you want to play this game!

Across The Night update

Across the Night to You will probably be done within the week.
Only one scene left to go...
This was an interesting game to work on, since it's a love story (=not much like what I usually write).

Two-dialog display

Came up with a way to have two say statements (which can be the same or different dialogue) display at once in Ren’Py, thanks to fabulous screen language.
(The slight downside is that I was half-asleep when inspiration struck, and so that section of code is identified by the variable name “doublepants”. I guess I was thinking of Homestar Runner.)

Well, this is odd...

For some reason time-sensitive messages in In the Chaos don't seem to be working after a certain time (11AM, I think). The code is set to read the hour in 24-hour time, and if I get it to print the current hour accordingly, it does so...but it still displays the generic "fallback" message that is used in case of the time being unidentifiable.
I can't figure out what I'm doing wrong.

Das Minneschwert Support Sketches working!

Thanks to a kind soul, I finally managed to get these working! The current plan for Das Minneschwert is to offer one development branch that has these custom images for each bit of the extra dialogues, and another branch that uses the standard sprites (to save bandwidth).
These are just placeholder images, but I like them.

In The Chaos 0.5.0 beta demo

(A.k.a. Project Appleknights.)


Version 0.5.0. Approximately.

The audio function of the video recorder started crying when it tried to find my laptop’s video card…


Current text style (as opposed to the one used in the demo).

You can set the player name to whatever you want, but the default one is randomly chosen from a massive pool of various interesting ones, Disgaea-style.

Thanks to my awesome sister, even time-sensitive messages are working now. (That is, some bits change depending on the time your computer's clock is set to- e.g. if you're apparently playing in the early morning, minori complains about how late she's had to stay up, but if it's midday, she scolds you for making her cut class.)

Text © Matthew E. Some rights reserved. Licensed to the public under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
Contains images © Serendigity. Licensed to the public under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License.

Some caps

Just some Across the Night caps.

Oh well.

Looks like Across the Night to You won’t be finished in time. Ah well, I’ll still be working on it since it’s a fun story.

[Fiction] Three Star Gazers shorts

These are the part of a sidestory I’m still fiddling with, Gunsmoke and Red Light.

Projects

These are merely some of the various art, literature, and software projects with which I occupy my time, in no particular order.