Hello everyone & thanks for stopping by my first dev log. This is quite an experience for me since this is my first game since taking on wanting to try game design. 

For me, games have been a huge part of my life. Ever since I was a child I can remember playing some of the most retro of games. I started off with an old Atari console which had it's fair share of text based adventure games & I just remember falling in love with the stories they told. Sure they were limited in their functionality, but the prospect of me, being a character in this game & my actions making a difference is probably why the construct exists today.  In many ways, I feel this has come full circle, a way for me to honour that experience & memory.

So about 4 months ago, a couple of my friends were telling me about how I should make games also. Big shout out to Matt Reeves & Vidas  Salavejus for really getting me into this. In many ways I feel like I have been adopted by them & clearly they see something in me which they felt warranted to get me into the whole game dev thing. So, given my background in coding (very limited by the way & a long time ago) I decided to start with unity & blender. Within a few days & I had made a prototype for a shooter & for the most part it worked really well! Sure I hit a few bumps along the way but my friends were there to help me. 

Eventually I put the project to the side & started researching scriptable objects instead of monoBehaviours. This made my design process a lot easier for The Construct. I was abler to make it in a modular way that allowed me to hot swap rooms in & out by simply right clicking, add a new room, give it a description & a string of north, south, east or west for the room exits & a simple script that called the description when entered. 

Then it was just a matter of dragging & dropping my rooms into the navigation bar & repeating the process. Sounds simple right? I guess for that specific part, yeah sure. But then you have to add details, such as items to find, what these items do, secret door ways, inventory management & usable objects. This was a little trickier. 

For secret doorways & entrances there was the little matter of creating a script for an action response. This was attached to the item. This meant that when you then used the item in game it created a new room & something within that room happened. For example, using the skull on the altar didn't make you leave but a secret doorway opened in that room & thus created a new line of text to show the player what had happened. This proved quite difficult at first as I had to get the player to somehow learn that this item was worth taking. Eventually I managed to structure the whole story in a way that made the player feel as though the item was important, and this again, was all in the details. 

My biggest challenge though was dealing with unity's limit on text vertices. To be precise 65000 vertices was the max amount of text unity will handle before it crashes. Being a story driven game & specifically a text adventure, I had to either find a way to minimise my descriptions in the game or clear the text after each room was entered. Because the game contains ASCii art as well, it was important I try & find a way to clear the text. I remember my first time after finishing it & playing it through being super thorough & examining everything that eventually I crashed the game. My heart sank. Once again, Vidas to the rescue & we decided on this simple line of code. Now we are here. Launching my first game & I couldn't be happier. 

aaronsTextUI.text = "@clear";