Figure 1: Yay, now the citizens of Skara-Hinton can send memes.

I finished getting the remaining lines of Act 1 annotated with labels; the parsing of the script thankfully didn't get as gnarly as it could have potentially gotten (zero regexes were written!).

There was one final feature I needed to get the embedded short story out of the markdown file and into the game as a storybook: I added a capture label that dumps the unprocessed text between that label and the next endcapture label; scenes can then access all captured content in a Dictionary and do their own processing on it:

[capture](dash-against-the-rocks)
---
One day, a young whelk who had been meandering in the Pacific ocean was caught in a moderate storm. Storms as big as this were infrequent but not unprecedented so it was not unduly scared. Retreating into its shell, it allowed itself to be swept up by the waves and thrown across the sea. While waiting for the storm to die down, it reminisced on how it had enjoyed the last two seasons there; the sunshine had been plenty and there were plenty of transient brethren to converse with.
---
...
[endcapture]()

Listing 1: Excerpt from the embedded short story: Dash Against the Rocks

The scene takes this and then gives it off to another node which renders the content as a storybook:

Overall, this approach of kicking off custom functions from the markdown file seemed to work out well and I got into a nice development flow with it.

For quick testing, I also added in a 'pre-condition' function that would run whenever I fast-forwarded to a certain label - this function would set up the scene, move characters etc. to the point of where I wanted to test next.

—

I had ended up spending a bit of time getting the NavigationAgent working with mixed results; it would have been nice if I could have gotten characters to move by just by telling them where they needed to go, but they still sometimes got stuck in a busy scene.

In the end, I decided to play it on the safe side and resorted to placing 'cue' sprites in the scene and getting the characters to move to those. Although more fiddly, it was a visually interactive process and didn't run the risk of a cutscene never ending due to a stuck character.

2 Craft

3 Tooling

{
  "Create a custom action": {
    "prefix": "ca",
    "body": [
      "\"$1\" = _${1/-/_/g},",
      "# func _${1/-/_/g}(ff: bool) -> void:",
      "#     pass"
    ],
    "description": "Create a custom action"
  }
}

4 Coming Up