And thus begins The Road To 80%.

We’re back with another update on the progress of Guardian’s Guide. In the previous week, I finished the content relating to the final maps and switched my focus to completing the ending title events for the personality routes.

These routes are titles your daughter gain after choosing certain personality traits, working certain jobs, and completing certain tasks. The titles themselves are unique animated illustrations based on the jobs or events they’re associated with. These titles are granted at the end of the game, some time after she turns 18.

I’ve already written all the events related to each title and I’m currently in the process of transcribing it into the game. What I’m going to show you today is the visual-fx of when you are granted a new title. I’ve written a custom, award winning script just for this showcase. Enjoy!

I tried to keep the dialogue of each title compact and to the point, but a few of them have some length and involve other events due to their content. There will be 11 titles in total. It won’t be possible to get them all in one run, but you will be able to get a few. There are also dialogue events relating to close friends that are only available based on the personality traits you choose.

After I finish transcribing the dialogue, I need to redesign the titles displayed in the Records Menu. I want the requirements for getting each title to be visible to the player. If the player had to guess which options they needed to select for each play-through, I imagine that would become frustrating after a while. (It would for me) I also want to give the player the option to change the daughter’s illustration at will. (after they reach the end of the game)

Once that’s all complete, I’m going to start the Tournament Arc. I’ll go further into details once I arrive to that point.
Lastly, I want to discuss the subject of efficiency. I’ve been wanting to talk about this ever since I finished the battle and exploration, but I’ve had to focus on the milestone and my retrospect. Now that I’m past that, I can tell you how efficient I’ve become with game development over the years.

The one thing I’ve noticed about working with data and transcribing information is that you do A LOT of repetitious actions. In the beginning, I didn’t mind it. But as the data grew larger, and the information became more complex, I soon began contemplating methods to make the process easier.

Guardian’s Guide has over 1,000 unique assets in the game. When I say “assets”, I’m referring to each data item listed in the framework I’m using.
Each of those data items had to be created and implemented by me. At some point in the process I’d had enough of manually typing the data of each item with my hands and decided to look into automation.

My goal was simple, I needed to get information from spread sheets and into unity. (copy and paste, simple, right?) So in my search for automation tools I came across AutoHotKey. This seemed like the ideal solution, but I wasn’t into the idea of manually scripting every task, I just wanted a GUI I could easily navigate to my goals.

Enter Pulover’s Macro Creator. This is AutoHotKey, but with a GUI, and boy does it work well. Thanks to this tool, I quickly accelerated my data entry and saved my hand from a lot of pain. And it’s not just data entry I use this tool on, I also use it to make shortcuts that work only on the program you want it to. For example, I have a script that sets the engine into “game mode” with the click of a button. I also have a script that starts windows voice to text so I can say words I’m not sure how to spell correctly. (I also have an offline solution that’s more accurate but it’s slower overall)

Now, this tool sounds perfect for every occasion, and it does cover most of my needs, but, I still have to take the time to make the script. Also, the script needs to run in the background once it’s made. Lastly, I have to use my keyboard and mouse to activate the script. When it comes to large programs like Unity, there aren’t a lot of free keys I can use. What I really needed was dedicated macro keys. Surely, there’s a solution that gives me automation with physical keys, right?

Enter Stream Deck. This tool took my game development to the final height. It is my peak. When I first got it, I didn’t think I’d have too many uses for it. I already had AutoHotKey scripts, surely a more simple automation tool wouldn’t be a very useful addition, right?

Wrong, wrong, wrong! Having dedicated buttons is a god send! Here is a very simple example. Both the daughter and the player have custom names the user can set at the beginning of the game. These names are stored in variables. Both of these names are referenced many, many, times throughout the game’s dialogue. Normally, I would have to navigate to the variable section of the dialogue node and manually type the variable name so I can generate the full script that would properly display the custom name once the game is playing.

But now that I have Stream Deck, I just press a button and the daughters script name is automatically typed. Done! You have NO idea how faster I’ve become now that I can press a button for every repetitious task I do. The same goes for copying and pasting strings from one program to the next. I also use it to start and stop screen recording, I use it when I record my voice, I use it to change my multi monitor displays. I can cycle through a list of strings, copying and pasting into a text field.

Let me repeat myself, I can cycle through a list and paste it into a text field, with the click of a single button. You may truly have no idea how fucking amazing and time saving this is for me. Sadly, I only figured out this trick toward the end of the battle and exploration development. But boy was it helpful.

Please note, I can do everything I mentioned in Stream Deck with AutoHotKey as well. It’s just that doing it in stream deck is faster and more convenient. For everything else, I can create an AutoHotKey and launch it using stream deck. Yes, all of this power at the press of a button. I am in developer heaven.

One last trick I figured out was using ChatGPT for, well, everything. I mainly use it for correcting grammar in my sentences. But it can program simple AutoHotScripts and pretty much any other script I’ve asked it. I use a few other websites as well, such as thesaurus.com, quillbot.com, and DeeL Write.

As for managing and writing information, I use WPS Office, and Balabolka which is great for text to speech. It lets me hear my dialogue out loud so I can make sure it doesn’t sound strange.

I think that’s everything I wanted to mention. This post has become very long so I’m going to end it here. I hope you fount some of this information useful. Even if you aren’t game developing, some of these tools can be very useful for you. Talk to you guys next week!