I have some progress to report today. Mostly, we're still in the phase of writing a bunch of boring infra/boilerplate code, so there's not much to see yet. However, I can show you two things:

1. I made a programming language

I once had a colleague tell me, "if you find yourself inventing your own programming language to solve a problem, then you're doing something wrong." Well colleague, you're probably correct about that. However, I am a freak who thinks that the tedious and tricky process of designing and implementing a language is fun. Plus, there probably is no existing, well-supported language that expresses keyword-based dialogues and can target old video game consoles. I emphasize the "probably." It's also possible that this language does already exist and I've just been wasting my time. I didn't check 🤷‍♂️

Anyway, the language is neat. I call it Script of Utterances For RPGs, or SUFR for short. The acronym is bad, but consistent branding is important. It looks like this:

```

@kedzie : *pet

^ The dog's body language makes it clear that he does not wish to be pet. You respect the dog's desires, granting the poor thing at least the dignity of its own body. $

@kedzie : AND(#hasfood, NOT *pet)

^ The dog perks up. Do you have food? $

@kedzie :

^ The dog stirs and stares at you wearily. $

```

I will probably open-source the spec and tooling after the game is done. I'm happy to write more about it if anybody is interested.

2. I made a UI mockup

This is what I expect the "dialogue" module to look like:

I found those borders at https://bdragon1727.itch.io/border-and-panels-menu-part-1 and I think they look great at Megadrive resolution.

Note the little Breakout game in the upper left. The idea here is that I want it to be a little bit tricky to say exactly what you want, just like in real life. I don't know yet exactly how I'm going to implement dialogue options. It probably won't be Breakout, but that's the general idea of what I'm going for.

Anyway, things are going good. Keep watching this space!