So after a bit of a break from my own work, I’m revisiting a game engine project for building visual novels. Right now it’s kind of a Frankenstein monster, cobbled together out of systems that were built ground-up for other things.
So far a lot of my contract work has been educational or simulation games, so I figure that getting this thing put together right could only benefit in the long-term. Plus I’m hoping to polish it up enough that I could release it as a free package on the Unity Asset Store and up my street cred.
The areas I’m looking into now are unit testing and better exception handling, so step one is to do another pass on the old code and make sure everything is testable. The XML parsing system built for my last contract is one of the more complex and error-prone systems I’ve dealt with, so getting tests and exception handling in place would be a huge step forward.
And of course what’s the point of building a visual novel engine without a visual novel? So I have something in mind for that too. More on that soon (I hope).
-Jonny
Jonny Aiello 