Rendering Dialogue

I mostly got the implementation of dialogue working properly. There are still a few pieces that need work, such as how to replace things like {playername} with the player’s actual name and how to deal with quest advancement. I’m not worrying about it too much at the moment, though, as both string replacement and quest advancement aren’t MVP goals.

I also made a creative decision when it came to dialogues. If you take a look at the character portrait in the corner of the dialogue, you’ll notice that it uses 3 colors instead of the 2 that all other sprites use. After messing with two color portraits for a while, I decided that they simply didn’t offer enough definition for something as detail-important as a human head. I found it hard to violate my own rule, but I think that’s rather the point – the rule was to help me not spend too much time on art assets and to provide a unified look and feel – I can still accomplish that with a limited use of 3 colors rather than 2.

As for the features I still need to work on, I mentioned both quest updates and string substitution. Since I’m currently aiming for MVP, I don’t want to implement those at the moment. All that matters is that I should have already accounted for those in the foundational code structure. Substitutional strings are already ingested with “{}”, I should be able to write a string split later that extracts that and puts in the real string. Quest updates are pulled in the same way. I’ll worry about that later.