Last week was the first full week at my workplace in a while where everyone was on deck. During the ramp up back to a full working schedule, I also spent some time watching a Programming with Mosh video that covers the main basics of Python, which is what Ren’py uses. Here’s the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_uQrJ0TkZlc

It does some good coverage, particularly of lists, dictionaries, tuples, and objects, which I think… will come in particularly useful for me as I refactor some of the code.

The last few days, I’ve been standardizing the variables in saddog’s variables.rpy file. I’ve decided that I plan on storing a lot of the flags as strings, which I’ll append into the character dictionaries.

For example, saddog has a section that defines a lot of flags like:

Instead of programming them that way, I plan on storing them in the “flags” key for the character’s dictionary:

This should make it so that whenever I want to toggle the flag to true, for example “sleepparentsroom” all I need to do is call:

$ nicole[‘flags’].append(‘sleepparentsroom’)

And if I wanted to check if ‘sleepparentsroom’ was true, instead of doing:

$ sleepparentsroom == True

I would simple do a check of:

‘sleepparentsroom’ in nicole[‘flags’]

Apart from that… I’ve designed a general Hero’s Journey for Sarah, who’s one of the characters I’m adding to flesh out Alexis’s story.

Currently, I’m working on finishing up the conversion of the variables.rpy file, which my deadline is set to be January 21st (3rd week of January).

I’m also brainstorming a class implementation for the alignment/path system.

I kind of want the alignment system to work in a theoretical level, kind of like… I guess… that sense of innocence an individual has. So undertaking corruption choices, or loser choices is like polluting your vanilla choices. It may be small or something you overlook initially, but quickly snowballs. Or, some events outright just ruin the entire experience, like a fly or vomit dropping into your soup.

So I’ll need to ruminate on it. Apart from that, I’ll also need to think a bit about the Day/Event structure of the game, because saddog kind of wrote the original game as a lot of variations on time labels, which I personally find to be a bit… difficult to maintain.