UPDATE #8 - A functioning menu?!

Since the last post, I've been focusing on game menu (or at least one of them), in particular the character selection part of it.

Currently we have a very stripped-down version of the menu, which will eventually allow you to customise scripts with genres and such. But for now, we just have the ability to cast two actors and select a location (for the sake of my sanity). The location menu isn't so important right now, as that is a less complex aspect of the game-play and mainly indicates backgrounds and potentially costumes.

By clicking "HIRE ACTOR #1" or "#2", you are brought to this screen which shows a selection of nine faces. When you hover the mouse over one, it will show the name of the actor and their stats (which will later affect how valuable they are to a specific genre). When you click one of them, a purple-ish highlight appears around them and the "CONFIRM" button is active and ready for you to confirm that selection.

In addition to this, the selection of actors are chosen at random by a seed which generates every time the game boots up. There are 18 characters overall so far and I've also made it so that if in the "HIRE ACTOR #1" menu you choose, say, Kim Buckworth, she will not appear as an option in "HIRE ACTOR #2" and vice versa.

Moving forward, I still have a LOT of sprites to draw. Most characters basically only have a face at the moment. But my next goal is to make it so that when two actors are selected, they appear at the Overlook shoot AS those characters (instead of Lester and Janette).

UPDATE #7 - A new hope.

I feel like today was a bit of a turning point for Auteur. It was making my brain melt trying to perfect the 'shooting' aspects of the game, so I started to focus on the main menu.

As you can see, we not have functioning buttons (or button).

And we also have a selection of actors to choose from. They are randomly generated every time the game reboots, so whoever the seed chooses for you is what you get! I've also included a back button and what is currently just a rectangle that appears when you hover over each of them. Within this rectangle will be the stats for that specific actor and their fee.

So here is what shooting looks like in it's current state. The options can currently affect the clapperboard percentage, the star gauge and the time (which disappears when dialogue opens at the moment...). Next what we need to do is get any actor we want into the scene and also make their stats affect the game. We also need specific dialogues for each actor, so it's going to be a feat but I'm feeling good about it.

UPDATE #6 - Dialogue system.

So everything may not be working 100% correctly, but I'm pretty happy with the progress I've made since the last post.

We now have something of a dialogue system that appears at random intervals. In the future, these options will have an affect on the game but at the moment they all just close the dialogue window. I've managed to get everything to pause when the dialogue system appears but now the challenge is to get everything to start up again after it's closed.

I also need to think about the actors as characters and do some 'proper writing' to make their disruptions feel authentic and also tailored to them. I can always figure that out once the absolute basics are accounted for...

UPDATE #5 - Can everybody please just stop repeating themselves - yeah great thanks.

I'm still learning new things every day with this software and I managed to fix the problem I had with the stars in the last post. But otherwise I feel I've made little progress today. I've spent a lot of time just trying to figure out how to get sprite animations to only play once, which for some reason is very complicated and doesn't seem to have a simple answer...

Hoping this will just be another one of those times where I've been staring at it for too long and tomorrow when I have another look it'll all seem so simple... Maybe.

I don't use laptop.

UPDATE #4 - Maximum energy.

As much as it pains me to say it - I'm stuck once again. But it's a good kind of stuck that's forcing me to think about my code and try to unravel it.

Today we introduced Janette to the scene! I've got her walking to have a smoke when the break light is on, so that's something. Also there are 'energy gauges' now (under the clapperboard).

So, for as long as the actors are 'acting' (they're not right now but they will be once I get the core mechanics down), their energy gauge will deplete. The rate at which their energy depletes will depend on their 'reliability' score, which is specific to each actor. Here we can see that Lester obviously is less reliable than Janette as his energy has depleted much faster.

When the actors go for a break, the clapperboard pauses and their energy levels begin to rise. Oh and I got the director to yell "action" and "cut" when breaking/shooting.

So here is where the problem is... I can get the energy gauge to stay at the maximum (if they're stuck on break for whatever reason) but then once they come back to shoot, the gauge is stuck at maximum and won't go down. It's because I'm setting the alarm it's using to 'false' which seems to be a permanent thing in this software? I dunno.

Either way, I'm starting to see my original idea take shape.

UPDATE # 3 - Lester finally does what I want.

I have been ridiculously stuck on the most basic function for the past few days... So much so that I didn't even feel I'd made enough progress to post about it. But today I've finally figured it out! There are many things still to be done, but this feels like my first big achievement - especially since I figured it out on my own.

The problem essentially was this:

In Auteur, you are able to call for a break during a shoot to let your actors regain energy (the bars next to their face icons which are not even a thing yet). Calling for a break is done by pressing the space bar, and turns the green light on the bottom-right icon into a red light.

As you can see, the red light has now appeared and Lester is walking to the side of the set. This was a struggle simply trying to define when he should be looking like he's walking and when he should be looking like he's idle. A lot of the time he'd be moving but not... walking? I had a lot of contradictions in my code.

Now that Lester has reached the end of a pathway I'd set for him, he reads his script! (He's meant to pull it out of his jacket but at the moment his "script-reading frame" just appears, which is fine for now).

And most crucially, when we hit the space bar again Lester returns to his original position. Now that I've figured this out, it should make his counter-part a lot easier to code in too.

UPDATE #2 - I don't know how sprites work.

Not a huge amount of progress today! But I have managed to put together the sprites from my concept art and create the bones of what will eventually be a 'scene shoot' in the game. In the clapperboard will be the % amount of progress the scene has made (getting to 100% means the shoot ends). Below that is the actor gauge, which will go down over time if you don't call for enough breaks. In the bottom left is a star-based meter which, depending on the quality of the actors, will rise over time and contribute to the overall film quality. The top right is for the time and date, and the bottom right is the funds spent per hour.

Overlook location for a scene shoot.

I also spent a significant amount of time on character sprites only to discover that they need to be 'squared' to work as a strip. So now I'm reluctantly going through them all and getting them square. Ya live and learn, I guess... I've only been at this for two weeks, give me a break.

His name is Lester. In my head he's a kind of Mr. Banks type.