- Joined
- Sep 29, 2018
It could just be me, as I'm not a pro-l33t haxor programmer, I'll even say I'm sub-part, I know my place. But at the same time, one of the autists I know who taught programming did his damnedest to instill it needs to make sense on paper and to write it down before you try to implement it. And I bring this up for two things; the first, not that any sole Indie types probably operate with a lot of design documents, but you should have some sort of notes, scribbles, napkin shit, in some manner on how certain things would be fleshed out. And two, Final Fantasy VII's Date Scene; you have 4 options, and they are in order from dominant to lesser, Aerith, Tifa, Yuffie (who's an optional character by the way), and Barret. Every character is allocated hidden points based on conversation decisions or even party makeup, whoever has the highest points upon reaching that part of the game will go on a date with Cloud; if there's a tie then see the dominant->lesser order. There's also Valkyrie Profile (the first one) which has two metrics to gauge how you're doing; the first is more direct and in line with your mission find worthy souls to send to Asgard, you fuck around and Freya will give you one warning to get your shit together, you continue fucking around she will come down, kick your ass and give you the C (bad) Ending. Then there's the other metric which depending on certain actions, will set you on the path for the A (true) or B (normal) Endings.From my understanding he is attempting to make something that is rather complex as he wishes to make every action result in a consequence that effects how the game and story play out. So to be fair, that is a very difficult task to achieve.
What I'm trying to say is, his idea of what he wants doesn't seem that difficult in theory; you assign values to decisions and variables, at times the game checks your scores to determine which branch. And now I bring it back around to my first point, writing shit down and having a design document. If you want this labyrinthian path of choices and consequences, you better have something to go by, otherwise you're just gonna be reworking everything the moment you change the smallest thing. I'm not saying it's easy, but what I am saying is like a cook or other jobs; prep-work will save you a lot of... whatever you want to call this 15 minutes out of 160+ hours.