Custom scene example part 3: Starting with the YAML for the first part of the scene

Hi all!

This is the 4^th post in this series about making new scenes for Newlife. For the earlier posts see: Intro, Overview &Preconditions, Planning.

A quick warning: there are some changes to things like method names coming in 0.4.12. As such, the examples given here will not work properly in older versions.

After planning a scene, the next step to actually making content. There are a number of ways to do this, and you might find your process is different from mine – that's fine.

One approach I sometimes use is to simply write out a key path from the scene in a text document and then convert it into actions.

For this scene though, I'm taking the opposite approach: I'm going to define the actions first and then I'll fill them in with actual text later. This has the advantage of letting me run tests early on while the files are quite simple.

I'm also splitting the scene up into sections. To start with, I'm just doing the parts in the Part1 diagram from the planning stage. This makes sense for this scene because part1 covers the path where the PC complies with blackmail while all the other paths split off from a single action: the one where her partner finds out about her cheating.

You'll see some slight changes from the planning stage such as the new "agree meekly" action and in later posts you'll see that I end up making some changes to the yaml files as well.

That's normal. Scenes usually get refined as I work through them and come up with new ideas. The plan is supposed to help organise my thoughts and understand how the scene will flow: it shouldn't be an inflexible commitment.

I've uploaded these first-step files: YAML and VM. You can run them the normal way, by copying them into the newlife/additional_scenes/user_custom_scenes folder, enabling custom scene testing in the game options and then choosing the test custom scene weekday-evening action. 
You'll need to use 0.4.12 or later for this to work - that isn't possible at the time of writing, but I'll try to get a dev version out with these custom-scene changes soon.