Developer Diary 38 - Clothing Stores

I always talk about how the clothing stores are harder than the other stores to design, but I haven’t really focused on explaining the ‘why’ behind that.

When it comes to changing things like your hair, there is just one location to go to. The game has a list of different hair options, and cycles through them as you choose which option you want. This means option 1 is a hairstyle, option 2 is a hairstyle, and so on. When it reaches the end of this list, it cycles back to the first option.

For clothing stores, things are different. There will be multiple different stores offering different styles to choose from. Because of this, the game has a harder time of tracking these. Initially I just had the lists linked to the location. The game would ask “Where are we?” and based on that variable use the correct list. The problem with that was that I was unable to easily save that information and then later on load it back in. Since there would be 2 different tops tied to option 1, the game wouldn’t know which to choose, and since the loading can happen at any location, the tracker I used before became useless.

 
I knew the ideal way to get around this was to just give each piece of clothing their own unique number, or ID, and cycle through a list of ID’s depending on which store you are at. This means we could have a store which offers option 5, 7, 8, 10 and 15. This system would also be very flexible to later on have items unlock as you progress in the game. The main issue with this solution was the cycling, however. I didn’t know how to create the lists and then cycle through them, without adding lots of duplicate code (aka bad programming).

Finally I have that figured out though. For now, the game initiates an array which contains the different clothing options per store, and accesses this info when a store is entered and you are cycling through options. Since each item now has their own unique ID, saving and loading becomes a much easier system, where we just save the ID and then call it back in whenever we need it (for example, you try on a piece of clothing and decide you don’t want it, the game needs to now change your clothing back to what you were wearing!).

I have only got this working for the tops, but everything else should not pose too much of an issue. There is still the system that checks whether you wear a dress or a top/pants combo, which might now have broken, but it shouldn’t be the hardest thing to fix.

Since this system now works, there are plenty of other stuff I can begin deleting. I am always a bit nervous about this part in the process: something has become irrelevant and can be deleted from the project. A part of me does worry that I might want to refer back to this later, so I hesitate whenever I find myself facing this choice.

We are getting closer and closer to the bug-fixing part of the release. I still am not sure whether the night time part should be in this release or not, since it is so empty and pointless right now. I have some ideas for jobs, but these will really only begin to shine once the event system is in place and I have had the time to draw some erotic art for them.

As always, thank you very much for your support <3

Albatross