Hiei, that much is clear!
My current to do list:
1. Format more of the text that can be heard during festivals or optional scenes. (I have to see it running in the game to format it well.)
2. Add the new time tags to the script. (Easy, but still kinda time consuming.)
3. Redo acquired item lines so the "obtained item" text looks better. (The lines will have to be retested in context to make sure they don't break dialogue formatting when items are acquired during a conversation.)
4. Add color tags for red hearts and gray music notes, and reformat lines.
(I really wanted to add red hearts instead of white hearts in the text. The problem is, colors are set by tiles rather than by letters, so the wrong colors can "bleed out" into the text, or you can have a heart that's half white and half red, or something like that. Each heart has to have enough of a buffer (which is generally about four spaces) to make sure that this doesn't happen.
But the game really likes to add hearts to text, and sometimes it uses them liberally. The problem is, that's four spaces added for nearly every heart that appears. That screws up the formatting of the lines, so pretty much every line with a heart in it needs to be entirely reworked and retested in the game, often multiple times, until each window is passable.
It doesn't SOUND like much, but it's a ton of work, believe me. It's all superficial stuff, but it will make a difference in the end. It's worth the extra work.
There's only one game in the game that I'm not happy with.
The line of dialogue is spoken by a character who first says it directly after an item acquisition line, which requires new line tags to move the text down... But after that, the game uses it to start a line, so if you have new lines before it, it'll start at the bottom with a couple of blank lines above it, and then the rest of the lines will have screwed up formatting, and...
Uh oh, wait...
I thought of a solution now.
Add line breaks to every acquisition message to make them always take up the whole window, and then remove all new lines from the follow-ups! Then I don't have to use that reworded version! Why didn't I think of this before!?
The problem is... This means that even MORE formatting work will need to be done to account for the linebreaks that got cut out from every follow-up line in the game! Still, I'm glad that this solution will likely work, because that bit of dialogue sounded really robotic as I had edited it. (My original solution was to make sure that every sentence that this particular character said never needed a line break, but making her talk that way gave her a very curt, mechanical feel for that bit of speech. It contrasted with how she usually speaks.)
So, good news... All of the lines will be well done, no exceptions.
Of course, there's the bad news... It's gonna take a bit more time, and another playthrough, to identify and fix the multitude of lines that'll get screwed up in the process of fixing this one error. What's clear though, is that Doug and DDS will surely be done with their work by then, and I'll be the one stalling the project's release... Partly in spite of my hard work, and partly because of it...
