The Serious Issue

Since the last week was going so well, it wouldn’t be right without some issues showing up the this week. This monday while in a programming meeting with my teacher, he gave me a heads up about hard coding lines of dialogue in the game. I always knew this was a problem but since the engine was built for it to be hard coded, I didn’t think there would be an issue. Since we do want to reach as many as possible with the game, he adviced me to implement the dialogue from an external file such as .xml. This is so that when we want to translate the game, all that has to be done is for the .xml files to be changed. Easier to change there than it is to change in code. Therefore, this whole week was spent learning about how to parse .xml files in Ren’py. This also meant that I hade to do a lot more python programming than I had expected.
As if the process wasn’t hard to begin with, there was little to no documentation about how to do it in Ren’py either. All that was left to do was to scoure the internet for clues about how to do it. Eventually, I learned how to parse .xml files and use it to implement dialogue into the game. However, now the question is whether it doesn’t just add more code to the project. As a lone programmer on this project, I have to decide what is worth doing. I believe this might be worth the time I put into the research but it all comes down to how we structure the files and if I find some way to minimize the code in the project.

It’s not that we have a line-of-code budget or something but the less complex code I have to write, the more stuff I get done. On monday I will meet with the teacher again and I will discuss these things.

About Rasmus Lindgren

2014 Programming

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