A lot has happened since November. I became employed again, in a relatively positive workplace. My legal name change went through, and I’ve begun living openly as myself more and more. I’ve tried participating in a few game jams, with no success. I’ve been busy.

I also had a few setbacks following the release of the demo. One thing I didn’t account for was the way dialog boxes cover the bottom 32 pixels of the screen. The Flash version of the game didn’t have to worry about that; besides running in a higher resolution, it also displayed dialog as text boxes next to the speaking characters (or at least that was the idea; I never got it to look right). I was deliberately mimicking the way Yoda Stories displayed dialog boxes with this decision, and one day I’d like to make a little engine that does a better job of aping that aesthetic.

Unfortunately, a lot of the characters were appearing within those 32 pixels covered by the GBStudio dialog boxes, and I really disliked how it looked. I had two paths around this obstacle: find a way to render the text boxes somewhere else, or redesign the screen layouts and character interactions to avoid having them happen in that section of the bottom screen. I thought the former option would be easier, and with a little searching I discovered that GBStudio’s functionality had already been expanded by user-created plugins. I found an “Advanced Dialog Box” that allowed boxes to appear from the top of the screen, in addition to other new functionality. I implemented them in a few of the opening conversations, and initially I thought this plugin would be the answer to my problem.

Sadly, it was not.

There were small issues that weren’t dealbreakers. For instance, the text boxes would still rise vertically upward when placed at the top of the screen, meaning they seemed to emerge from within the map rather than from beyond the screen edge. I didn’t like it, but I could live with it. The Advanced Dialog Box node offered no preview when setting it up in GBStudio, unlike the standard Dialog Box node, which shows how the box will display text. This preview is essential for working out text wrapping issues without having to compile and run the game, so this fucked with my work flow. Still, I pressed on and implemented more dialogs with the Advanced Box as best I could, until the last few issues blew the wind out of my sails.

First, there was the lag. Somehow the Advanced Boxes took longer to load in the actual game. It took double the amount of time to get through the initial conversation, and it made everything feel sluggish. Then, there was the spacing difference. The default Dialog Box positions the Avatar (the optional sprite representing the speaking character) closer to the text than it is to the left border. I don’t like this either, but I figure I can edit my avatar sprites later to give them more space. The Advanced Box fixes this by pushing the text a few pixels to the right, once again fucking with my text wrapping. Combined with the lack of preview, I realized that trying to use these Advanced Boxes was going to make scripting conversations a lot more difficult and have the game run terribly. I needed to walk back and take the other path.

So, that’s what I’ve done. It turned out to be less difficult than I had anticipated, especially once I realized I could “cover” some of the bottom-most objects as if they were obscured by the southern “wall” of the rooms being portrayed. I also implemented a simple border around the rooms; I had purchased a few Game Boy style sprite packs for another project, and their sample rooms used the same border. I loved how it looked, so I stole it.

I’m still working on implementing the rest of the original game. I realize that I have designed the room objects at the completely wrong scale from the characters, but at this point I think it’s charming that Gary and his mother live in a house made for giants (they are technically demons, after all). Who knows when the next update will be?

Certainly not me.