The fourth day of the Game Jam is done.

I’m really happy with the progress I made today - I’ve completed about a third of the base story! At this rate, I should be able to finish the story in time, so at least I’ll be able to submit something playable!

My approach to coding the game

I know debugging code can take a lot of time, and time is precious to submit the game before the deadline, so I’m trying a different approach. As Ink is designed for you to write your dialogue and story as your code, I’m putting in a lot of placeholder text that simply explains what I want to achieve in that scene.

This allows me to speed through coding the entire thing and make sure there are no bugs. Once that’s complete, I can go back to the start and begin replacing the placeholder text with stuff that is actually… y’know… not boring. 

Adding more work for myself…

I’ve also changed one of my stretch goals into a necessary feature: making it accessible for people who don’t have the physical items. My game uses a deck of tarot cards (well, just the Major Arcana) and some dice, but most people don’t have a tarot deck lying around.

I’m pretty happy with the method I created: it’s simple but effective

I started off creating a global boolean variable called ‘physical’. At the start of the game, I ask the player if they will be using a physical deck of cards and dice and I track their response, only showing the above code if they aren’t playing with the physical items.

When I need to pull a card, I create a temporary variable within the scene, generating a random integer between two numbers I specify, and then using an IF statement to tell the game to show the card associated with that number and which scene to go to next.

There might be a better way of doing this, but this method makes sense to me, and it works flawlessly in testing, so I’m going to stick with it.

That’s it for today! I estimate the coding will take another day and then I can get started on replacing the placeholder text with actual writing and attempt to draw some scenes.