Assignment 1 part 2 - Character Customization

Thought I'd make a quick update before I start the jobs I have to get on with today.

It took near enough the full weekend, and rather a lot more lines of code than I really though, but at this point now I've succeeded in recreating the character customization feature in Mass Effect in do while and switch statements.

This involved an awful lot of branching as the choices stacked up. As mentioned in the previous entry, I have

name    

• name (ccname + "Marshall");

gender  

•  male = (+1 male);
• female = (+1 female);

history  

• spacer = (+4 paragon, +1 spacer);
• citadel born = (+4 renegade, + 1 citadel);
• colonist = (+2 paragon, +2 renegade, +1 colonist);

profile   

• sole survivor = (+1 survivor);
• war hero = (+2 paragon, + 1 warhero);
• ruthless = (+2 renegade, + 1 ruthless);

class      

• Soldier = (health = (health + 25), soldier + 1);
• Infiltrator = (infiltrator + 1);
• Adept = (adept + 1);
• Engineer = (engineer + 1);

And so gender branches out in two directions, and then each of those branch out in three directions... and then each of THOSE branch out in three directions... and THEN THOSE branch out in four directions. And at the end, I put in an option to start the game or reset... which wipes out all the int changes involved with the individual choices and returns you to the beginning of the customization screen.

I cut down the number of classes to 4, and while they won't act all that differently, I hope to use the ints to provide extra options for the player to choose as they interact and travel through the area I'm going to be doing. For example, a soldier may get an exclusive option to kick down a blocked door that the other classes may not get, and a character with high renegade points may get an extra conversation topic.

***

Long story short, I got more done than I thought I'd have done by now, it works, and I'm taking a day off to try and relax. I want to put in an option to skip the character creation with a default load out to allow a player to quick start.

It is likely that I'm doing something overly complicated, (Over 8000 lines for this section alone!) but I generally follow a rule that I'll try and take my learning as far as I can. I have to look into a couple of things that may help me make things look a little prettier (And work out how to make the window bigger), but I also want to avoid trying to use commands and lines/code that I'm not yet familiar with.

 I'm also compensating for the complexity of the character creation by making the story itself not so wide branching. It really will be a choose your own adventure, I don't intend on allowing back tracking (Although I will be allowing for some investigation)... something like that WOULD be beyond my present skills.