So in the last fortnight I've been working on some of the more boring stuff, adding in different save points as well as the autosave feature, and putting together the beginnings of a working main menu screen. For now, I've got the Sun and Earth appearing across the sky depending upon what time it is (local time) although they don't actually move. If you open the game at 1pm, they'll be in a different place than 7pm.
I'm also beginning to tackle the localisation, especially before I start putting in hundreds of strings for the speech and tutorials – I really don't want to have to go through and re-do hundreds of lines, so I'm going to have to tackle that next I think. No fun with nothing *cool* to show for all the work. :(
Finally, I'm getting to the point in the game where the player has gained all of the basic upgrades to their robot through the tutorial levels, and can begin putting together more puzzling rooms with a wider selection of enemies.
Digging through some of the documentation I've got my head around how timelines work, but I'm puzzling out how to get the objects to interact with the timelines effectively. I think I'm going to use Finite State Machines to control the AI, triggering the different states via the code in the timelines, but I'm finding it a bit of a pain.
I've also been pondering cutscenes. Although it is nice and sometimes necessary to use a cutscene to tell a part of the story, there are millions of players who have skipped through every cutscene ever, including thousands of lines of dialogue. I think players should be told the story through gameplay, and that almost everything that is show in a cutscene could be shown through gameplay.
Do people watch cutscenes? Would they be missed if they were removed?
