“Wouldn’t it be cool if each and every minor character you meet is completely unique?” ~ An idiot in November of 2019.
That was the start of one of the most… Well, interesting decisions the game started with. Because I loved that idea a bit too much.
And the results are felt in a variety of ways throughout the game. But before we go into the negatives, I want to look at the positives.
~ The world never feels empty or stale. In early builds of the game, the castle was a wasteland, just you and Anya, and Anya was a bit of a…. Let’s say… Recluse?
She never left her room.
That’s fine, I guess, but I wanted more. So, the first idea, naturally, was to just populate the world with static NPCs. Other students can stand in the halls, give you the same, generic line…
Well, why not give them 3, since I can track time. One for each time period.
And the real change came when I thought… Why not make their positions randomized!
Easy enough, actually, pretty much just a few switches, and…
“Across all the maps in the game”
Oh…. That’s… a bit more hard.
And this is one of the first areas that, surprisingly, I strayed from RPGmaker’s default toolset and actually did some coding. Because, believe it or not, doing this by default would be absolutely insane.
So, instead, I create an array in a variable, and randomly assign positions and locations and make sure to never duplicate them!
But that wasn’t enough for this absolutely idiotic person. Oh, no. I wanted them to WALK AROUND!
Normal walking was out immediately. Too much conflict with placing. So I created two seperate states, one to track walking, and one standing. And walking state has them phase through you, because a whole host of problems occure if they don’t.
And this was absolutely perfectly working until the first major playtest…. A week before launch (Jan 1st, so around Dec 24th was the start of this playtest.
Only a few hours in I saved and quit…. and then was unable to load the save file. But some loaded, just not others.
A few hours of testing narrowed it down…. And I figured out that any map with walking students on it had a high change of bricking your save file if you saved while students were moving on it. This is obviously not something that can go into a release.
So, when faced between taking out almost every single walking student in the game (and losing a ton of the content that I rather liked…. I made the choice to implement save points as a temporary stopgap.
This decision has been relatively unpopular since launch, but I defended it by saying “It’s because of a bug that bricks save files on loading.”
And I swear it’s still on my bugtracker. It’s there, in the background, taunting me…. From Dec 24th up until….. Yesterday.
That’s right, It’s fixed…. Possibly
It took a bit of work(and likely breaks a few areas if you save in the wrong place….) But I fixed saving and it’s back in the menu!
I’m leaving in savepoints, because they don’t hurt anything, and we might still need them (I’ll do my best to thoroughly test the save-system before the next update, but I’m sure there will be edge cases that break something SOMEWHERE)
In the meanwhile though, one of the most game-breaking bugs might have been fixed! And that’s cause, in my books, for a celebratory 15 hour playsession of the new Animal Crossing to me!
HMA: Dark Tower Devlog 