Machine Made: Rebirth Saturday Jan. 9 (Scripting Saturday)

Ladies and gentlemen! Welcome to the Machine Made: Rebirth blog where we discuss our experiences in the world of game design, particularly what we've enjoyed the most and what has given us some problems with regards to designing Machine Made: Rebirth.

Today is a Saturday and I would love to show you just a few alterations to the script and construction itself of my game that we've been working on. What better way to start the weekend, when we have less of the clutter of everyday life to contend to, to really look at the meat and potatoes of this game. The idea for today's topic came to me last night when I was having a talk on social media with our lead programmer Josh — it went something like this. Josh and I were conversing about building three things for this game:

1. A script that would allow a character to dual wield weapons
2. A script that will change the dialogue and text boxes to something more illustrative and visually appealing
3. A standalone self-installer that will install our game in one click

Let's look at these topics one at a time and talk about possible solutions. Something that I both love and hate about coding is that it is straightforward to describe what we want a code to do, but it is not as straight forward as it is with say the writing process, how we want to implement it.

For example — the SBS script that I'm using features dual wield functionality but I dislike the way it's been implemented… essentially some weapons have to be for the right and some for the left, otherwise it doesn't work…

1.Here's our current dual-wield setup which is going to be trimmed soon for something simpler and more functional (I don't need two handers, or right and left hand weapons…)

2. Here's a little bit of playing around we did with the positions of Battle Windows… and here is a great script from Black Mage here on the GDU site for playing with custom window positions for other Text Boxes…

(http://www.gdunlimit…ion-message-box)

3. For our standalone installer… we're first going to have to remove all the RTP resources we're using, or replace them with customized ones…
we have something called "the NSIS installer tool to manage the installation of Machine Made. Creating the MM installer will be easy and flexible using NSIS. We can make handy shortcuts and Start Menu entries, as well as specification checks".

Each of these types of changes will require some playing around with and deciding just how and where you want the script to implement itself in the programming, it's a matter of how and when you use it, not simply what it is. That's a big part of the reason to me why making a functional script is a lot more nerve-wracking than writing the story!

I hope you've enjoyed this Saturday's edition of Scripting Saturday!

Cheers and have a wonderful weekend,
Allsvin