Was it really a break, though?

Yeah, well, no, actually. I think I just took a break from posting. I think I'll update once a week instead of every. effing. day. There will be uneffed days where you will be left to wonder, but hopefully not to wander! I've been listening to the Robert Inglis telling me of the story of the ring of the dark lord of Mordor. The composition I have is the "Complete Audiobook Collection" of six book, plus a prologue by J. T. and an appendix of the Annals of Kings and Rulers. I don't know if the other version has that, but this one does not include The Hobbit or "There and Back Again", so I think it's a different arrangement. Not very complete if you ask me.

I've really been working on figuring out the niceties of GBS and the limits I'm working with. I want to do certain things as they occur to me, but they end up being beyond the hardware limitations or too complicated to worry with overly much. So I'm settling for the easier, hackier-feeling routes.

For example, I was working on using the VirtualMachine code to script out all the dialogue and journal entries (there are over 80 pages of journal entries and I thought, "Well, it'll save space to use text instead of images, right?"). Well, I got a few hours into working with the text and found the vram limits to be too constraining. Only 128 characters available (Color+Mono) in the space and my pages use over 200! So now I'm doing near full screen sub-map tile swaps. I've a full 120 pages covering one background image that'll swap between sections to the visible portion of the screen (attached image). It fits within the limits of the image format, plus the number of unique characters is reduced as I'm using a font that fits fairly well in 8x8 pixels per letter.

Actually, maybe they don't. I might need to finagle some letters or make things less readable so the letters with tails don't combine with the character spaces below. :( Right now the several pages I have are showing 227 unique tiles when I can only have 192 total. Hm. And I spent several hours looking at different fonts and trying them out. They all had tails below the baseline, but I was hoping it would be okay. Dang it. Now for several more hours work while I find a font that fits exactly 8x8 and is still pleasantly readable. Poo.

Anyway. I wasn't really taking a break, like I said. I continued to work on and develop the game. I've settled on Platformer with some RPG elements and a few point-and-click scenes. The PnCs will occur at specific locations, not just anywhere (way too many scenes for that). Plus, I had an idea to allow multiple views of the same area (like, looking into a room from the north, south, east, and west), but I might have to nix that on account of it quadrupling the amount of work and the number of scenes to create... wait. No it wouldn't. If I just set the background up to have each view one above the other, then I could either A: sub-map swap the backgrounds (sounds more trouble than it's worth in order to move triggers and things around) or B: just reposition the player and and actor to that height. Triggers and barriers can be set up easily enough, I just have to watch my trigger limit.

Okay, let's try that!

Next on my plate, thanks to the unique tiles and pixel limitations, is to set up the journal into two halves (about 44 pages each), consisting of the story points in one half and everything else (characters and items) in the other half. A little frustrating, and will require changing scenes. I was hoping to avoid that, but I guess it's not sooo bad. So I'm off to work on that and some character story and whatnot.

Eventually I will get to actually story. But I'm not sure when.

Let me know what you think.