ZACHARY_BRAUN'S PROFILE

I'm in the outskirts of New York City, and everything is edging towards lockdown. Wishing people had acted faster! The only way to defeat a virus is to starve it of new ways to replicate... especially one like this, with its unprecedented incubation period for a contagious disease. The cold and flu manifest within 1-3 days, but this one takes up to 14 days. Can you even remember what you did 14 days ago? It's also most contagious in the first phase of illness, even before symptoms develop.

It's almost like a perfect storm of virus evolution perks:

1. Long, undetectable incubation period, with active contagion during it
2. Not too fatal (If your host dies too fast you can't spread yourself)
3. Long survival on hard surfaces, and semi-airborne (Can be present in larger microdroplets of cough/sneeze/mouth aerosol vapor, which can hover for up to three hours.)
4. Yet-unproven suspicion that ibuprofen and aspirin increase its activity, due to them increasing the number of ACE2 receptors on the surfaces of cells, which the virus uses to gain entry

It's not quite the plague, because we have better communication technology now, and, well, science. But our response has been woefully skewed towards "let's see how much we can get away with."

I work at a grocery store, so I'm not left wanting for work (or exposure...).

Wait a second, I think I know where this comes from. A while back, several years back at least, YouTube had its own section or site for kids, and people were purposefully posting videos targeted at kids which had disturbing things somewhere in the middle.

It makes code easier to write, especially if you use custom systems, like customized item slots. It becomes much more useful the more custom systems that you're using.

Instead of using Variable Operations for every possibility of an outcome, making a huge amount of Conditionals and Variable Operations changes, you can just point to the variable that you want to change, using another variable. (But, you had to have planned to set that variable up first.)

Let's say that you have a lot of playable characters, but you don't know who is in the player's party. You can make it so that when the player chooses characters to be in the party, a certain variable is set... like, 011:Party Char 1 = 10 ("Bertrand")... 012:Party Char 2 = 4("Molly")... 013:Party Char 3 = 23("Fido")... OK.

Now, let's say that you're using a custom battle system, and you've organized your player's stats into certain variables. You've planned it so that the character ID, when multiplied by 100, matches the variable in which you're storing that character's HP.

So, character 10 (A guy named Bertrand), when you multiply 10 by 100, you get 1000. This means that Bertrand's HP is stored in variable 1000. Molly's would be stored in variable 400. Fido's HP would be stored in variable 2300.

Something bad happens to the party and you need to damage the HP of the characters.

You would construct a little loop to damage their HP, by 50 HP.

Temporary Variable A = 11
Loop
>Temporary Variable B =[[Temporary Variable A]]
>Temporary Variable B * 100
>[Temporary Variable B] - 50
>Temporary Variable A + 1
>If Temporary Variable A > 13
> Break Loop
>End
End Loop

In the above loop, Temporary Variable A points to the Party Char group of variables, which you've arranged to be variable #11, #12, and #13. It becomes a pointer for whatever values are in these variables.

Temporary Variable B then grabs the value in Temporary Variable A. In #11, it would be 10, Bertrand. Then it multiplies that number by 100 to find the variable in which you're storing Bertrand's HP. Then, it subtracts 50 from that variable. Then, it increases Temporary Variable A by 1, moving to the next Party Char variable. If the number is over 13, then that's it, there are no more Party Characters. Exit loop.

A lot of using pointers relies on how you set up the architecture of your own game. If you're using a custom system, it becomes totally up to you.

In the entire continuum of Romancing SaGa games, every battle is a green dot, and everything else is blue.

Really well-put together game. At first, I was confused, because I was earning so little money, I didn't see how I'd be able to make the cut. But then my time ran out and the game prompted me to save... ahhhh.

Really clever, great SaGa-style progression too... My characters got stronger and stronger without me realizing it.

It also gives you a chance to train up different characters on each playthrough, then choose your favorites.

Everyone should try this game.