I ended up with more free time than expected. For that reason, I decided to work on tutorial 61 in my MonoGame RPG tutorial series Eyes of the Dragon. This tutorial wraps up with quests. First, I fixed a bug where you could not finish quests. Then, I add in a game state to display the rewards for a quest. Finally, I update the conversation state to remember which conversation we are on with an NPC. You can find the link for the tutorial on the Eyes of the Dragon page of the blog. Also, you can access it with this direct link.

What’s Next?

So, I haven’t given much thought to what’s next for tutorials. I don’t want to, but I think that editors are where to go next. Unfortunately, the game is many steps ahead of the editors. So, I think the following few tutorials will be on editors. Otherwise, what I could work on is saving and loading the game. I have been avoiding that topic, though. There is a lot to consider when saving and loading the game. I don’t want to enable saving and loading just to redo it because there is a breaking change in the game. I want to keep those topics to the very end of the tutorial series.

My Projects

It seems that my projects are my tutorials. I get more out of working on those than I do out of working on something for me. Don’t get me wrong. There are things that I could work on, like the IDE for work, Forest Rush, or Silver Prophet. But, I don’t find that all the fulfilling, to be honest. I get more out of my tutorials. I could get back to my tutoring now that I’ve settled into a rhythm at work. The problem is, it has been so long since I’ve tutored that I’ve forgotten where we were in the game we were working on. Also, working on four languages at once has me a little confused. When working in Visual Basic, I keep thinking in C#. I want to add a semicolon at the end of every line. The same is true with Python. I haven’t worked with Lua in a few weeks, so I will be rusty at that. I will keep wanting to use VB or Python.

Final Thoughts

Tutorials seem to be my main focus when I have free time that I want to devote to coding. I just find it the most fulfilling out of all of the tasks that I could be doing. That said, I don’t know what the next tutorial will be on. Most likely, it will be on editors. It could be on saving and loading the game. However, if I do that now and make a change that requires an update to saving, I have to redo loading. That will get tedious very quickly. So, I will likely work on editors next. I encourage you to keep coming back to the blog for the latest updates on my tutorials and projects.

Good luck with your game programming adventures!
Cynthia