Content generation is going well. We're now at Shelter Universe V3.0, which partially absorbed things from V1 and V2 and everything in-between.
Last week I upgraded our content compiler (Zorlag) to address quests being handed in out of order and various nonsense like that. Quests hanging at different branches of dialogue trees, it all appears to be working as intended.
Zorlag has also been upgraded to transparently import data from older versions of itself, which will be invaluable once the content starts pouring in, and we keep discovering "missing" functionality that needs to be put in.
Since this is the last update of the year, perhaps it is appropriate to mention Zorlag in more detail, as most of the past year has been spent designing and developing this utility, one that compiles dialogue and quests
In 11/2008 Shelter was a simple quest gameplay demo which was entirely portrayed in a video we released. It accounted for most possibilities of out-of-order quests, doing unexpected things, etc. It was also an absolute pain in the ass to script. It had a length of something like 1% of the game, and having the other 99% of inter-dependent content woven this way would've been the kind of nightmare that Fallout 2 team probably had to go through, resulting in near-unplayable state on release.
After 11/2008 gameplay video its become strikingly obvious that Shelter's quests cannot be scripted by hand. Same could be said for branching dialogue, peppered with checks for player's state, stats, inventory, etc. One change somewhere would require retesting the entire tree.
* * *
This is when Zorlag was born. Zorlag is an automated content compilation tool, one that handles things like "quests out of order" automatically, NPC nags/reactions depending on quest status, and prevents a bunch of ... asynchronous anomalies.
Unlike developers of Fallout series, we do not have any weird hardcoded content like elevator buttons, intros that are forced to play after a specific map, nothing.
Whenever a new feature is needed, it is put into the game, so that it can be reused later through Shelter Scripting Language (SSL).
Zorlag compiles quest and dialogue content directly into SSL routines. NPC reactions, status checks, item hand-ins, everything. When we get a new feature, we put it in Shelter, and then allow access to it from Zorlag.
This is the kind of stuff Zorlag makes:
CHOICE05[[[PERSON_HASITEM[SELF`Antibiotics]=0]
AND[PERSON_HASITEM[Player`Antibiotics]=1]]
AND[QUESTACTIVE[q_antibiotics]=1]]|`I brought the medicine you asked for ! Allright!`|ADJUST_REP[F_BALL`30]|
TRANSFERITEM[PLAYER`HENDRICKSON`ANTIBIOTICS]|
ENABLEACHIEVEMENT[q_antibiotics]|XP[Player`100`completing the quest.]|JUMP[15]
Hail Zorlag. Without it, we'd be lost.
...
FOREVER.
