Day Whichever Day This Is:
Today I accomplished all the goals I set yesterday, wrote some bad dialogue, and crafted some badly-coded events!
Here's some of the bad dialogue. You don't really realize how bad the stuff you're writing is until you see it in a different setting, so putting dialogue into code and then playtesting that scene is a really good way of seeing how bad your first drafts are.
I managed to fit all the action of the 'cutscene' in just three events, which was pretty nice - there's a short conversation, then a battle sequence, then some sprites change or disappear and there's more conversation, it's cool.
I almost forgot that I also took a screenshot of the Ghost event so here's this (look: more bad dialogue!) This event gets triggered by the player, hopefully right after the battle (I'm leaving it up to the player, so I just realized that when I get time I should throw in some random easter egg events on this map). The switch then activates the previous screenshot'd event (I really should have uploaded these in the other order) and really, the takeaway here is that I'm pretty proud of myself at being a halfway decent GUI-directed coding.
And here's the last part of my goal for today: introducing another character!! This is Ineni, Vaughn's apprentice of sorts. She... really should have a darker skinned sprite, and while I'm thinking I won't get around to creating my own visual assets by the end of this jam, I'll definitely continue working on this game after the jam is over, and original character sprites is gonna be high on my priority list.
Anyway, she joins the party at the end of this short conversation, and the player is finally given complete control. Freedom!
OK, anyway. Now, my goal for tomorrow is to create the overworld map, and start populating it with enemies. I was originally thinking there would be no random monster encounters in this game, but I'm rethinking that. Human-based battles will definitely be more important (this game is about GHOSTS so), but there's also a lot of magic, so of course there will be magic-based creatures.
I'd also like to create the event that encourages the character to explore the world map, and some more ghost NPCs. This is a ghost game!