Agile. A wonderful process for some, a barren desert for those who like scenic waterfalls. But I'm not sitting around for two months researching RPG design and coming up with concrete final data structures before populating them with my game data. Now most of this project's dev process is going to be closer to Cowboy Development of course, but it's my project.
Regardless, I'm going to need an easy manipulatable data format for my in-development game that it easy to modify when I make changes to the engine because I haven't thought things through. But such a format is not going be directly usable in the game.
So I will need tooling.
My initial idea is to use a readable plain-text format for game definitions - I'm considering YAML right now - and to create some build tools to compile these into the final binary game images.
I'll probably do the same for the graphics, converting easy-to-edit PNGs into native CPC format and embedding them into the cartridge image.
And I'll need some metadata to tie everything together so everything knows what everything else is, and the game is linked properly, and my conversation trees are attributed to the correct NPC and my quests award me the Elven Sword rather than the Clay Pot.
And it might make the game data itself nicely portable.
But regardless, I expect many posts, especially up-front, to be more about data formats and data conversion, and stressing about page switching on an 8-bit console.
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