The dialog tree has gotten complex enough that running my automated coverage on it takes too long to be feasible. Hooray for exponential growth and weird interactions between states! Guess I'll have to figure out a better way to manage this stuff, because a stochastic brute-force search through the entire possibility space is obviously not the way to go. Maybe an A* approach would work better? (Although trying to figure out a cost underestimate is tricky as heck...)

The way this dialog system is structured makes for a lot of interesting nondeterministic behavior. It's less a dialog tree and more a dialog forest. I'm sort of figuring out a bunch of differnt ways of managing various interactions as I go along, but there's currently around 140 nodes and it's difficult to even begin calculating how many paths there are between them due to the way this dang thing works.

But anyway! Most of the dialog paths are written and are in. And they're kind of flexible and adaptable! I think I only have a couple more sub-paths to do, and some fleshing out on one of the major paths.

However, there's still a LOT of stuff to be done on this track. For "minimal viable product" I have to finish the NPC's sprites for the initial scene and I have a whole bunch of other scenes to draw (most of which will only be visible for a few seconds total, sigh...) and for the full thing I also have a couple of minigames to implement! I certainly went all-out on the design for this track.

Fortunately, this is probably the most complicated game in the album, and there are quite a few that are intended to be really simple. I'll probably do one of those next, because this one's really kicking my butt and I could use an easy one next. :)

Other stuff I've done for this release:

• Redid the sprites, and made a complete set of walk directions for the NPC
• Added the capability for animations to "stack" (which allows the NPC to do things like pace around a bit or face a particular direction after finishing an animation)
• and that's it