X! M! L! X! M! L! As if I’m back in high school, this week I started out by doing a bunch of work in XML. I needed a way of tracking which characters are in which scenes on which days and where they go, so I decided to drag a rabbit out of my dusty old hat and create an XML file that can track all of those things.

It took a little while to get it all working, but I eventually figured out how I wanted it structured and got it all set up and working how I wanted it. Admittedly, I am aware that I almost certainly should be using MySQL for this purpose instead, though, so it’s very possible that I will be switching my messy XML system into a (hopefully) much cleaner, smoother MySQL system before I actually start writing and implementing the daily dialogue for different characters.

Speaking of daily dialogue for different characters, the other core focus of this week for me was writing a huge chunk of the dialogue for the first week that I want to get implemented (through 5/18 in-game). That all went very smoothly because it’s hard to write buggy dialogue, so hopefully that should get implemented pretty smoothly once I get to it.

There are various things that I did NOT implement, though, such as functions for spawning new characters that will need to be implemented. Actually, I don’t remember if I got them implemented or not. If I did, I definitely didn’t test it. Oops.

Unfortunately I didn’t really do a lot this week that I can actually show off visually through screenshots, but hopefully that will start to change this upcoming week before playtesting next Friday. Most notably, I will need to create placeholder assets for Keons, make sure that all of the dialogue is implemented, and create rough starts for the garden and chapel areas. Once those are complete, I’ll be able to start cruising on the rest of the content. (you know, in an ideal world)