Weekly Report (Nov. 12th)

Guys and gals, it's that time of the week!

I was out of town for a couple of days, which, as you might expect, impeded the progress quite a bit. It was semi-expected (honestly speaking, I will probably be absent for a few days next week as well), but I planned to do more regardless. In particular, I planned to add at least a small amount of interactable objects to the second available location, with some descriptions of what was going on around the protagonist. However, I've only finished the layout today, so it would seem that the main bulk of that work will have to be held up until next week.

Aside from the changes and additions that I have already outlined in the [fix update] earlier this week, this is what has been done:

- Added new types of notifications (akin to the “Unavailable!” and “Journal Updated!” notifications) – now the player will be notified when new encyclopedia entries, sleeping scenes, or recipes are added to the protagonist (yes, they are technically tied to the protagonist, so if I ever have set-pieces when the protagonist is temporarily gone, the acquired entries, scenes, and recipes will become unavailable until they are returned to the party);

- Overhauled the notification system – not only did I change the internal logic, but now the notification container should move at a fixed speed (previously it was affected by either frame rate or some other factor I'm unaware of, and it didn’t look pretty since the container was prone to moving at different speeds);

- Changed Lucian’s name in the Russian version – I suddenly remembered that I had plans for a name-related pun in the future (it’s past demo content, so it may not even be relevant, like, ever, but I did it anyway);

- Revised the text for and implemented another encyclopedia entry that is going to be added on exiting the church;

- Prepared portraits and body sprites for the two new characters needed for the next stage of the tutorial;

- Also prepared two background images for the next couple of dialogues;

- Updated the tool I use for generating tiles within locations, and I’m also changing the logic I’ll be using for organising levels from now on;

- Updated the code related to moving between tiles – now, for one, the move buttons will become inactive when there’s no traversable tile in the relevant direction, and, for another, it’s now impossible to spam-press the move buttons (the pressed button will become inactive, and will remain inactive until the party have physically reached the tile), which makes a huge difference, because the sounds played on repeated button pressing will no longer violate your ears;

- Suddenly realised that it’s nigh impossible to represent an area using the tile presets I currently have – I had to introduce another level of tile transparency, between fully visible and transparent, that I’m planning to use to depict buildings and other ‘solid’ landmarks that are not traversable but are still, you know, distinctly visible;

- Finished the layout for the outside church location (sort of – I may change things in the future, but overall, I think it’s alright as is).