Hi NALErs!

This week has mostly been taken up by starting to finalise the plan for Case 2. To explain a bit about what has been going on...

NALE is set up as a pair of state machines; an HLSM (high-level state machine) and LLSM (low-level state machine). Each case starts off at HLS1, and completing tasks causes the game to progress to 2, 3 and so on.

HLSM states are the big things, usually involving moving from place to place. Meanwhile, LLSM states control things that happen within locations, such as the flow of the states in courtroom scenes.

This all means that I need to plan these states in advance; you can adjust them later, but it really pays to try and do as much up-front as possible.

The reason for this is for debugging. Once I have it all set up, it's very easy to tell the game "start the player at HLS3, LLS2" and be able to "jump" to certain points in the game.

Additionally, at the end of every HLS, the game wipes the player's inventory, and it then gives the user all of the items they are supposed to have for the next state. This means that even if I was to make a mistake, and allow the player to progress too quickly, they would never get "stuck" because they lack a key item.

Additionally, I've been writing character bios for the new characters, including the character who will work as Nina's PA/secretary, and might be involved in quite a few future cases.

I'm hoping to finish this process by the end of next week, and then I can get back to actually making stuff in RPG Maker!