Hedgerow Hall

by Hedgemistress
Hedgerow Hall
Serious role-playing-oriented game world, with animals.
ID:2080743
 
Old school Hedgerow Hall was buggy and difficult to maintain because it was a very complicated game made in a very ad hoc fashion. That is, whole systems and sub-systems were grafted on as it occurred to me to add them. The effects of spells, poisons, and debuffs from injuries were all handled differently, for instance. And there was a preferences system by the end, but it wasn't implemented in any unified or uniform fashion. Also, any changes made to the preference tree could break existing characters, or at least shut them out of features.

I've said before that the advantage of the remake is that I have the original version to serve as a design document. I don't remember everything from the old game (the NPCs in the hall are likely to be different for this reason alone), but I know what I crammed into the source code and I can plan accordingly.

My priority map for bringing the game up to a playtestable state depends on the way subsystems will depend on and relate to each other. Skill training depends on the existence of two uniform systems, a preference system and a prompt system, which I'm developing along side it in order to have actual test cases.

This is what the preferences tab looks like:



Not terribly impressive, but I'm hewing to my mantra of Glitz Is Not Gameplay and worrying about how things look after the game is otherwise finished. It's clean and readable and it works exactly as you would expect (click to check or uncheck). By the time other people play it, all those tabs may well be independent pop-up windows that only appear when needed, with only the map with some sort of HUD indicator for important status stuff and the main text scroll visible otherwise... but I'll have to teach myself a few things about the interface system to do that, whereas I already know how to do tabs.

The nifty thing about it is that the objects that power it are created from a master list, and only the associated values are saved for individual players. So if I add new preferences to the game, old characters will find them sorted neatly into their list of preferences with the default value.