Three Dollar Quill

In this post:

• Musings on the control scheme.
• Tasks to look into to extend Homunculus into MonFree.
• Not ready to make big changes to the map handling yet.

I realized that I want to think a little about control scheme.

I'm inclined to say that the basic control scheme should be:

• number keys: use item/ability from hotbar
• some choice of keys, such as wasd: up, down, left, right
• going to need to think a little, maybe have dialogue controls differ some between Retro and Journeys. Basically, I have the idea that it should be possible to cut off conversation in Journeys, so it might need more buttons. But Retro just needs start/continue and continue/cancel.
• Might as well have buttons that just go like "Ztart, eXit, Continue". Stick with that for now.
• Something to bring out the menu, like tab maybe.

So, with everything I'm thinking about, I need to figure out a way to iterate. Easy things to change:

• Model player facing.
• Switch from generated rooms to fixed rooms. Then, make the staircases come down in a specific location and add staircases up. Replace walking up/down a staircase button with the interact button, and have it be done from adjacent tiles. I may change this idea later. It's inspired in part by trying to use the stairs in the Gen 1 Celadon buildings. Work on implementing buildings.
• Remove the combat mechanics. Switch all AI to wandering randomly. Pop up a simple dialogue message on interacting with an NPC.
• Implement QBN mechanics, and re-implement the inventory in terms of QBN. Add a "money" quality. Ensure that qualities are scoped to entities. Kind of like special components that just contain a number or an enumeration. Or a formula for one or the other? Qualities should be one of a specific set of types, but with a component_type based on the quality type.
• Mark some tiles as randomly triggering events. For now, just pop up different dialogue boxes.

I'm going to need to think some more about how to accomplish the map transitions, because it seems like I don't have a fully fleshed-out and consistent idea of how the maps work in the games I'm trying to imitate here. Like, I'm pretty sure the maps in gen 1 at least were like, beyond certain boundaries on the maps, you triggered a map transition, but no other character did. This had the side effect that NPCs could wander out to a point where they'd suddenly vanish if you followed them. My issue thinking about this is that the playable area in the maps comes together to form a more-or-less contiguous thing, and there's no jarring transition, so either there's an underlying coordinate system that the maps are defining subsets of, or there's some data that's specific to pairs of maps that gets them aligned. The fact there I don't yet see an obvious solution to all this is a sign to me that I need to step away from this part and think about it more later.

Anyway, once the above changes are done, then I think I want to start getting a battle system in, and shops. Shops would basically be a place where you find an NPC who'll exchange around your qualities. For the battle system, that needs a Roster component, and Monster entities.

Thinking about qualities scoped to entities, stuff like stats definitely needs to distinguish between "not present" and "zero".

This week turned out really hard, but I guess I made some progress.

Next time, wrapping this week up.