Weekly Report (Nov. 5th)

My first weekly report! (Oct. 30 – Nov. 05, 2023)

This probably wasn't a mind-bendingly productive week, given a rather short change log, but hey, I'm quite sure these changes and additions will enhance the overall experience. Some of the changes below were already implemented in 0.1.0, namely those that are above the launching bullet point. Yes, I will try to keep the changes in the chronological order. It was relatively easy this week, since I spent, like, two whole days getting mentally prepared to register on itch and then getting everything sorted for the initial launch.

So, what was done this week:

- Fixed a bunch of bugs related to the changes I previously made to game mode switching;

- Made sure the build didn't have any critical bugs both in the demo content and in the testing areas;

- Revised texts for the demo content;

- Registered on itch.yo and made the 0.1.0 build public!

- Rearranged objects in the disclaimer scene. Now the ‘Warning’ and ‘Click to Continue’ texts are tied to the disclaimer’s text, so they won’t ‘drift away’ from it on certain resolutions;

- Added a neat ‘expanding’ effect to work alongside the 'fading' effect on switching various UI elements;

- Fixed a bug that prevented the bars inside the Character window from filling properly;

- Overhauled the logic behind updating party UI elements (hopefully, this change didn’t break anything that’s not immediately obvious);

- Reverted my decision to ‘save’ companions’ names in the save file for further loading – it just didn’t occur to me at the time that if the player were to start a playthrough, then return to Main Menu and change the language, and then reload the save, the previously saved names would stay in the language the player started with;

- Fixed the companions getting removed from the player party upon every loading of the test level – now the party composition will only be reset once, upon getting to the test area for the first time;

- Fixed tooltips – they now shouldn’t get stuck open, at least not as annoyingly often;

- Made sure separate tooltips for non-interactable buttons worked as intended – now peculiarities show their requirements;

- Speaking of, White Knight and Renegade are now unlocked on reaching the first test area, though debug key commands still work;

- Revised and implemented a couple of encyclopedia entries that are now added right after finishing the introductory dialogue;

- Reverted a questionable decision for the church location that resulted in a number of undesired effects, such as the removal of the protagonist from the player party and moving the player from the last visited tile to the predetermined starting tile upon loading;

- Welp, apparently, something -DID- break after I updated the code related to party UI elements – everything worked fine in the editor, but not in the build, as I learnt while playtesting. I had to spend another couple of hours trying to understand what was wrong. In the end, I had to divide the code into two separate scripts, each dedicated to either panel;

- Made the 0.1.1 build public!