Writing, writing, writing

...and some scripting work too. But mostly dialogue and design writing this week. Just a heads up there might be a bit of light spoiler type stuff in here.

So I'm trying to juggle the dialogue trees to handle if and when the player has spoken to a specific character. In theory it'll keep track of if the player has spoken with that character for the day. Then after that they'll get a generic dialogue saying something like "I'm busy come back tomorrow". I also want to allow the player to skip talking to a character entirely but still have the dialogues make sense if and when the player does talk to that character. Then there's also chunks of tutorial text layered in with the story / flavor dialogues. So there should always be the option, even on the generic "not now I'm busy", for the player to select something like "tell me how this thing works".

Most of this basic low level stuff is working and just needs polish. Then there's layering in possible corruption routes that will continue or branch off from the base dialogues if that player chooses specific actions. These I haven't fully figured out how to implement or how far to take them yet.

The idea here is also to give myself some practice in a limited setting with a limited number of characters and get more familiar with interwoven dialogues, actions, and the results of those actions.

Then I've also been trying to figure out how to hook this into the larger world. I want the actions the player takes here to have repercussions on the player on the outside. Nothing that the player won't be able to overcome or compensate for but enough to feel like part of the larger world. Which I'll need to keep track of how and when the player leaves the monastery and what quest flags were active at the time. Were they stealthy enough that no one even noticed they were gone? Did they fight their way out? Did they charm their way out? Did they find some other alternative? And then based on that start giving the player an optional next step to pursue (or ignore). Think of how in Skyrim after the player leaves that very first dungeon and the dude they escaped with says "let's go to Riverwood" and then the player has a direction to follow if they want to or they can go and wander off into the world.

So yeah. Oh and I did a bunch more detail work on the monastery. Mostly adding trims and polish and starting to add a few props and containers.