CAUTION!! CAUTION!! MORE WALL OF TEXT!! CAUTION!! CAUTION!!
Well, I had free time in class today (durrr definition of the derivative durrr) and I was really wondering about how programming the game would work, in the grand scheme of things. In no way am I saying this is how it should be done, but this is my opinion on the subject.
SA Phantasm, in the end, is only lacking in a few departments. They successfully built the stage and imitated ZUN in Danmakufu, of all things. However, the scripting job was terrible. Messy, unorganized and full of stupid tidbits that could make it much better. Knowing this, it was probably made by one person.
I want this code to be extraordinarily organized. Not just neat, but coded as though to give other people inspiration that want to work on similar projects, and for the script to be easily navigable. I know for a fact that pretty much anyone who's ever used Danmakufu at one point tried to use CtC as a reference and found that they couldn't because everything in there is chaotically messed up. If this gets done, it should be able to be used as a resource for other people as well. Another thing, is we'll have at least a few people working on it. This means that we need a set of rules that we're going to use for scripting, or else there will be contrast everywhere and nobody will be able to figure out what another has done. This means unless you're using a small looping temp variable, you shouldn't have letter variables or undescriptive names, and instead use detail and lots of comments.
These things have lead me to believe that instead of starting bottom-up, we should build a giant library of tasks, subroutines and functions and create the game around that library. As in, motherfucking huge. If we can build each section of code piece by piece, it will end up much easier to program the stage, mechanics and basically the game itself. Attached to this post is a list I made noting everything I could think of that might be part of this library. It is incomplete and a bit messy because it was just scattered thoughts, but it's getting there. If we can build the game around a library of functions that spiders around itself, it will be easy to reference, use common data nicely and be very clean. If we can build this then each person working on the script will use more or less the same functions and confusion will be kept to a minimum on everyone's part. One more plus is that instead of waiting for all the graphics and whatever to be finished, this could have work started on it immediately.
tl;dr we should make a library of functions to make things easier for everyone in the long run