Man, when I first made this topic I had some hope that I might be able to do regular updates. What ended up happening is that between work and family, I had a limited amount of time to work on the game, and most of that time was dedicated to just wrapping my head around figuring out how to code what I wanted.
I'm familiar with some basics of coding logic, but it's been a struggle to figure out how to piece everything together. There's a lot of guides online, which I definitely used heavily and was incredibly useful. An issue I kept running into, however, is discovering that an approach/code one guide touted as the way to achieve this action ends up being limiting if I want to do something else. I first encountered it when I was coding the walking, but the more devastating example was the dialogue.
It took me a long time to figure out how to have dialogue for different characters that the player could scroll through. A lot of guides I was using did not seem to offer much help; they either showed how to have a single line of text appear once, without any changes, or they had their text display in unusual methods that I did not want. When I finally came across a guide that seemed to offer what I wanted to achieve, and even explained the logic of the steps that I could follow along, I was so happy. With the dialogue finally working, I was ready to do the next step I wanted to learn: making dialogue choices the player could choose from. The original guide I used did not cover dialogue choices, so I had to look elsewhere. Nearly every guide I found mentioned it would be easiest to have all the dialogue in an array. I realized that the code I was using for the dialogue worked with the idea that every bit of text turned into a queue.
At this point I had 3 options: I could redo my dialogue code entirely, starting from scratch, I could wrack my brain for hours to see if I could find ways to make dialogue choices with a queue, or I could give up on dialogue choices entirely and just have the player choose between 2 objects to change the end. This was near the very end of the jam, so guess what I ended up choosing.
My past me would be disappointed that I wasn't able to implement something as seemingly simple as dialogue choices, but at least by making the choices into a physical thing you choose between, it leads to my favorite bit of dialogue in this demo game:
This game jam ended up being a really good lesson in scale; I knew I wouldn't be able to do my -dream game-, but I thought my originals plans were attainable. I underestimated just how much time it would take for me to get a handle on the basics of coding in gamemaker, or the variety of different approaches people take to coding what you think are extremely basic game mechanics. Maybe if I didn't have my job or if my family wasn't around I would have been able to get farther along in my original plan, but I do like having a steady salary job and I do enjoy my family. I'm glad that I was able to have a complete game package at the end, with players able to get different endings.
As difficult as it was, doing the coding for this game has been super rewarding. I feel like I'm taking actual steps to bringing some of my game ideas to life, and that makes me really excited. I think it would be nice to keep on working on this game to see if I can make my original plans for it into a reality. If I could enact my original vision for this game, while making the code a bit smoother & organized in a way that makes my brain happy, I think it would be an excellent demo for the more ambitious game idea I had.
All in all: I'm really glad I finally pushed myself to do this!! I wanna keep it up!!