As some of you might know, Old Gramps has a few dialogues. Actually, it has quite a lot of dialogues. To be even more precise: I dare to say the game contains about 2000 lines for the two episodes that it contains right now.

I think you can imagine writing those texts was a lot of work. But the thing that has cost me most time so far, is implementing the texts in the game, since this happened manually so far.

Manually, yes. I manually CTRL-C/V’d all texts in a huge database-like script. All of those bloody 2000 lines. It took weeks, even months and the worst thing: it was boring as hell. As I reached the end of implementing the texts of Episode 2, I felt a lack of motivation: this wasn’t programming or game design anymore. No, it was work that could be done by everyone, even 6 year old children of 90 year old grandmothers - or even by a zombie. Dang, it was such a struggle.

As I walked through the streets of Karaköy, Istanbul, this holiday I realized that this problem - implementing texts manually and the fight against boredom while doing it - would definitely mean the end of Old Gramps: the lack of motivation this work caused would result into something horrific, namely, the game ending up on a huge pile of unfinished, dead games. Now that’s something I do not want to happen. Old Gramps is a project that could be my personal masterpiece. It would be a waste of time and effort not to finish it. I have so many ideas left for the game.

Yesterday, I came home from Turkey. I had an awesome holiday with the guys from the study association; I feel like I’m ready for a new semester and my motivation for practically everything has been reestablished. So today, I spent my time making a Java program that can automatically create the database-script for Old Gramps. There are a few things left I need to do manually (such as the Witness Accounts, Examinations and question answering, since these structures are more complex), but for normal texts and commands (shouts, fades, et cetera) this program does all the work for me. I simply CTRL-C/V everything in the program and it creates the database-script in less than a second. For your image: 50 lines would take me at least 30 minutes to implement, while it would now take less than a second.

I’m kind of stupid I didn’t come up with this earlier, am I not?

I hope this program will help me a lot and that it makes sure my motivation level doesn’t drop. With this preperatory work done, I’m ready for Episode 3. Thanks for reading and stay tuned!