So I've been working under the hood for a bit.

After completing most of the first part of Act 1 in Ren'Py, I took some time to reflect on my workflow, as well as the challenges and learning opportunities I encountered along the way.

Of course, I've lost a lot of the thoughts I originally wanted to put here, so I'll talk about whatever comes to mind instead!

Like how I'm probably going to drive myself nuts with the character art.  From the beginning, I knew I wanted the characters to blink and have different open/closed mouth states with varying expressions. 

Before	After
	Exhibit B: Luke's new neutral expression, on his new sprite. With his new outfit.

Of course, as I continue my dev journey, I'm anticipating the overwhelm of declaring hundreds of images, implementing and positioning said images in-engine, tinting said images...managing all of said iiimaaages...

It's spooky to think about. 

And the code for Luke for part one of Act One alone...looks like this:

That's just a tiny bit of the code. And it can add up real quick. 

The good news is that you can sort your project into as many .rpy files as you'd like! In fact, Feniks wrote a fantastic post about organizing your project. The not-so-good news is that I have ADHD and struggle with organization in general. Which... I think I just said I have ADHD twice.

But as much as I struggle with the nitty-gritty setup, I'm certain it's going to pay off immensely. Already I'm a lot happier with having the system that I do in place for characters speaking and emoting--though implementing something for emotes is going to be a different thing altogether. I don't know!

Maybe I will revisit this post one day and...actually write something cohesive. To be honest, I just wanted to make something identifying a challenge I'm facing at this specific moment in time so that I can revisit it in the future and compare notes. Who knows? Maybe I will come back here having figured out the answers to some of the questions I have right now, like:

How do I...

1. Change character expressions inline with their dialogue?
2. Implement a system that can position emotes over characters?
3. Have different dialogue boxes/styles for when a character is thinking, sick, "possessed", etc.?
4. Automatically assign images to layers based on tags? (i.e. bg breakroom would automatically be assigned to the 'bg' layer, eliminating the need to write 'show bg breakroom onlayer bg')

Those are just four Q's I have off the top of my head (just kidding I have an entire "notes" document in the project folder), and I'm still working on Act One. 

Oh god.

I'm still working on Act One.