A fiddling and generally stuffing about day the conversation with the butler now ends properly but that created a couple of  new problems that I had to fix, firstly the thought bubbles didn't look good so I have to fix them and secondly I got into also sort of both with walking behind and if front of things. In the five years that I have worked with WME I have revisit this anew each time.

Been a while since the last one, and as ever not as much progress as one would want, Main causes of the delay are

looking at a commercial software product to see if there is a business to be made out of it - probably

had some teaching which is always emotionally exhausting

watching loads of videos of adventure games - assessing the competition it's called

However as far as plains is concerned I have done the following#

1. Completed the dialogue with Foggit
2. Done some animations for the butler and have got these at the beginning of the scene and at the end of the conversation with Foggit

3 Reverted the right click menu to the original and changed the font colour in the dialogue box to white, I have also made the dialogue box slightly less transparent - it probably needs a bit less transparency.

4. some small changes to the dialogue

Rik Mayall

This is a great tragedy  like other's before him, Peter Cook there was so much more he could have/ should have done, he had all the talent, the charisma, the intellect and goodness to have affected peoples lives, making them laugh is great but he could have fought in the great fight. So sad for his wife and children.

Back to work

First fullish day in a while. Have been doing quite a lot of research and thinking.

I have been thinking through different ways of creating cut scenes and exploring the manga 5 product. Not entirely successfully, but that is probably more my fault. In an attempt to re-energise I worked on the conversation with Foggit and that went ok.

However I made a  change  to the main loop script by re-positioning the right click menu and I also resized the verb menu and changed it's back ground so all in all a useful day,

Moved on a little, now crafting the closeup conversation scene between Ron, the Doctor and then butler.

Once the trigger has been set in the conversation with Alice there scene moves into a close up between Ron the butler and Foggit,

both the Butler and Foggit are live, pressing on either will cause the butler to move to the right with the drinks tray

Foggit will turn and the conversation with Ron can begin

Opening Sequence

A strong opening sequence is always important.

Initially it was going to be the discovery of the body at a marsh and I have already developed some ideas for a cut scene to achieve this.

Having a rethink on this and perhaps it should rather cover something more of Ron's back-story,

The shots that I have in mind are arriving at Cambridge, images of going to war, trenches, gas attack hospital bed, woman leaning over hospital bed, back to Cambridge, leaving, woman walking off hospital bed, news papers, ash tray.

This could be done in comic strip form or as a series of fades and snap-shots. They could be repriesed as memories later.

Finished the "thought" interface

Rubbish name for the thing, but it is completed now, I have done a fair bit more to it, doing a little bit of string measuring to make sure that the text appears in the correct position within the graphic in the X axis, I have also modified the position of the thought bubble by taking into account the variation in the actors X position due to the direction he is facing. A font has now been selected which works.

Time now to leave the test framework and return to the main game and move on at last