Dev-Diary #2 - A single player action-RPG

So as I posted for the first time last weekend, I am working on a single player action-RPG. I have completed the Character Generation & Sheet systems. Those all work excellently. This week I turned my task over to creating dialog. There is Nelson Gonsalves RPG Dialog editor which I considered using, however upon further inspection of it, it wasn't exactly what I wanted and dialog being an important aspect of my game, I wanted my dialog to be exactly how I wanted. So I went to coding in my own dialog system. I preplanned and checked the logic over and over.

My goals for my own dialog system was this. Branching dialog in easier to use text files that are easily editable in a text editor, Nelson's RPG Dialog editor had a GUI editor that was buggy, and text files that were hard to read for editing. Conditionals, my role-playing system has character Charisma and a Persuasion skill, both of these will be used for Persuading, Intimidating, and Seducing NPCs, so I needed a conditional to check whether these would work or not. Lastly, I wanted scripts to be able to be triggered via these dialog options, for instance the player might recieve, update, or complete a quest through dialog, the player might also set the NPC hostile depending on their actions (attempting to intimidate and failing may lead to this). So with all of that I planned out and created my own text file format for the dialog and implemented it. The results are exactly what I was going for.



I am not 100% done with this as I am going through minor tweaks and also would like to create some default camera angles that will be forced when in dialog, ie: make sure the player's screen has the NPCs face in center view for dialog.

So after this, I will be working on the Quest system. The quest system I planned out while doing the dialog system but I have not implemented. It works like this, each has different states. If the state is at 0, the player does not have the quest yet. The initial state is 1 and there can be any number of states of the quest before the final state. So a quest can have 3 states (0, 1, 2) or 100 (0-99) or even more. Obviously that probably won't happen but the support is there to have quests that have as many steps and Journal updates along the way. This also allows the player to approach quests different ways and have the journal correspond to these different ways.

What is done ::
Character Generation - Attributes, Skills, Model Choice System
Character Sheet - In game character screen, used for viewing character stats and leveling.

In progress ::
Dialog - Branching (75%)
Journal/Quest Log (15%)

Not Done ::
Persistence - Saving/Loading
Object Interaction
Inventory
Mission portals
Unarmed, Melee, Firearm Combat - Based on attributes and skills
AI