A fun part of planning the rough story but then allowing it to mutate and form from the gameplay and is that plot points I want to happen are happening in ways that are different enough to surprise me when I compare it to the original draft. The current story is hugely different from the one I drafted back in 2016 for a variety of reasons - gameplay changes, character rewrites, new characters/location changes, item changes, and all kinds of other minor changes in the lore.

It feels like every minor change I make to the story is hugely impacting a different part and I only realise how big of a change it was when I start working on that part. Hell I wasn't even sure how or where each character would be introduced to the party until today. Originally I thought I was going to spread each of the party members between the towns, but I wasn't sure which order to spread them around in. Eventually though I settled on giving the most important (gameplay) character to the player right from the word go.

There's two reasons for this, the first is that the character is hugely important to the gameplay and is going to be downright necessary in boss fights. The second reason is that it makes sense from how the story is structured that this character would be in the first town. Due to their role in game (as a healer) it also makes sense that the player would be introduced to this character after the initial tutorial battle (which is skippable, don't worry about that).

The rest of the party members locations are still in the air as to where they will be, but I have a rough idea. Two of them will be located along the path of a dungeon, one of them will be located at Midden (a centralised town) and the final one will be in a forest (side area).

But this brings me onto an issue I really want to deal with - the character names themselves. Most of them are holdovers from the 2010-2014 development period, and a few of them still work. A couple of them are inconsistent and seem out of place with the world of Inkagafar though.

The two characters currently up for a potential rename are: George (main protagonist) King Lewis/Lewis II (all other kings have Latin names) Most of the other characters have names that fit the setting/theme, but these two stand out as inconsistent and will likely see changes.

The issue with this is that I'm going to have to go through the current mountain of dialogue and change all mentions of each character's name to the new ones, but I guess that's my own fault for not planning ahead or making these changes sooner.

Also in case anyone is curious about the timer thing from a couple days ago, I set up the conditional statements and the timer displays the current time correctly. Just a bit of closure for the nobody who cared.