Rooms, Sub-rooms, and Talking to yourself

When looking at the design from an implementer's perspective, it is obvious that there is a lot of ways we can handle implementing this game. The moving between rooms can be handled the exact same way that it was in the first episode, but this episode has additional factors that need to be considered. Every room in the game has at least one thing that can be done in that room. The handling of doing tasks within a room can be done any number of ways. The two ways I instantly thought of were to bring up a graphical pop-up dialog of whatever the player was doing or to zoom in to the object that the player was dealing with.

The pop-up approach seems like a nice idea, but adds additional coding requirements to every room. Getting the pop-up to appear is actually very simple. You only need to have the image set up as a movie object and make it invisible. Whenever the user does whatever action that causes it to appear, you simply make it visible. Of course, you then need to be able to make it disappear and prevent conflicting actions on the screen beneath it. Not necessarily difficult, but time consuming.

Zooming in is essentially like moving to a different room and is very easy to handle. Graphical transitions for the zoomed areas would also be possible, but lack of time prevents me from doing such things. Now that the Blazing Games site has a more relaxed release schedule, future games may have little extras like animated zooms, but when you are short on time, unnecessary frills are the first thing that should be eliminated from a project.

The other big problem with the design is that information needs to be conveyed to the player. While graphics and animation can present information to the player, the quality of that information is dependent on the quality of the artist. As there is no budget for this series hiring a real artist is not possible, though occasionally a better artist than me contributes artwork to the game. Pop-up text seems to be the answer. Knowing that there would be branching conversations in future episodes, it seemed that the development of a basic conversation system for this episode would be the ideal task for solving the information delivery problem.