Keep extending ADV game engine with Antigravity

I didn't expect this at all (I know that's the same line I started my previous post) - it keep exceeding my expectation (in a good way, of course!)

I'm writing this article mainly for myself so that later on I can refer back what I was thinking but also hoping maybe this might help some other people who might want to do something similar.

Anyway so what have I done recently? I'm asking Antigravity to keep expanding that CSV-based ADV game engine and it's going pretty strong! The way I'm working is that whenever I feel I want new capability, first I chat with Chat GPT (that I've been talking about my game since the beginning) and it help me craft a prompt that I can feed into Antigravity.

Since the last post, here are some new capabilities I added (not all these new capabilities are exposed back to txt file format yet)

1) I now have my message appear one character at a time, with ability to control the speed

go_with_else,10,SAY,エルス,あ、アクシスだ。おーい,,start_of_the_adventure,else@C:neutral,,,else:neutral,DIALOG,TYPE:120,

here, as you can see I can simply add TYPE:120 to slow down that message appearance (pretending a character speaking slowly)

2) ability to add BLACKOUT effect

This is super useful (I can also change the color and alpha value) effect, before dislaying a text that I want to put some emphasis

opening,12,FX,,,,black,,,,,NODIALOG,,BLACKOUT:fadeIn=400,alpha=1

3) ability to display text in the middle with bit of "ink" effect

It's not exactly how I wanted so I might still tweak but be able to put emphasis on text by simply providing few parameter is golden!

opening,15,FX,,,,black,,,,,NODIALOG,,CENTER_TEXT:fontSize=30,fadeIn=1400,hold=2000,y=-40,ink=1
opening,20,NARR,,それは、もう終わったはずの物語だった,,black,,,,,NODIALOG,,

4) very specific need/want to perform "symbol storm"

This is one of the effect I wanted for my game (but honestly I don't think I can implement this myself) - here is what it does:

• specify map (object) that can map some symbols to images
• randomly place it on the screen, and grow in size as it rotates each images and fill the screen

Link to screencast

I know this make absolute no sense but that's what I wanted and it implemented perfectly (I do end up tweaking a bit)

With this, game now looks like this: (please ignore the message - it's still non-sense, also "symbol storm" effect still need more refinement but be able to build this in "just few hours" is really something and that's what I want to share most today in this post)

I know - I probably shouldn't build animation (nor title screen) and instead, I should focus on building more fundamental part of my game but ... sometimes you want to do things in bit of out of order to bring your motivation high and for me this feels like a right approach (and best part of building everything by yourself (+ AI) is that you can decide whatever you want! :))