Hello everyone!

During a discussion in the Discord on code for my second announced Pulp title today, user UnbelievableFlavour was teaching me about WTF moments in coding where you're aiming to reduce WTFs per minute to a minimum when observing code. This lead me to consider how they would feel about the absolute mess some of the code and decisions made in my very first game (And really first coding of any sort) so I thought I'd share!

Conversations

One of the earliest examples of figuring it out as I went along is with dialogue development. With the witch example below, each time you interact with either the left or right bottom panels of the witch, the sprite changes completely (And the corresponding tile you didn't interact with) to allow for a new state and evolution of the conversation.

This became very inefficient really quickly and I can assure you there are a lot of witch tiles in my collection...This idea also continued for the snake, upstairs vampire & bear rug and I didn't change it because I don't have the patience and kind of like the little imperfections! Plus, having to change the main tile and adjacent tile you could have interacted with each time was long...

My idea for conversation development changed when I started learning about variables more and with the conversation with the downstairs vampire, you can see that each time you speak with her, the variable for the conversation goes up by 1 and so the conversation changes each time (This goes on further but contains spoilers). This feels much more efficient!

As for the butler clue system in the main entrance, I was actually quite proud of this! Each time you interact with one of the characters he can give a clue about, it adds to that clue variable and the option for that clue appears in his dialogue choices. Works well I think!

Moving between rooms

(A LITTLE SPOILER WARNING). As you can see from the below, to get into the cupboard in one of the bedrooms to meet the skeletons, you actually move via an exit to another room in order to avoid walking above the top of the cupboard. I'm sure there is an easier way to do this that looks less janky but I thought it worked ok!

Using the lamp on the bedside table also takes you to a completely dark room which is again a "goto" teleport to a completely separate room where the tiles around you "say" that you're too scared and clicking the lamp again takes you back.  Maybe there's a function to change all tiles around you to "black" but I thought this was quite fun.

These are just two more examples of trying to solve a problem with I'd imagine very strange solutions (Although someone once said to me that that's the beauty of coding...there are always lots of ways to get to a solution!)

Easter eggs

Lastly just to say that there are a few little lines of dialogue or Easter eggs when you interact with a bunch of different objects in the game. Try interacting with everything to see!

I hope this little blog was entertaining if not informative as a peak behind the curtain...I learned a lot from "giving it a go" this first time around and I'm very proud that the whole thing actually works. I'm full steam ahead on game #2 now and hope for it to be available before September (I might tease it soon...)

All the best,

Ollie