Weekly Report (Nov. 19th)

Hi, I'm late, as per usual :)

This weekly update is probably not very exciting (the development won't go quickly or smoothly judging by the looks of things), but I can't say I added nothing significant.  I tried to make the Outside Church location livelier by adding flavour text, and I also finished revising and implementing the dialogue that is supposed to lead into a combat encounter. It is supposed, but it currently doesn't, so the test area teleport has successfully migrated to the end of said dialogue. I also wanted to make the player character physically 'walk' up the alley during the dialogue, but I've run out of time this week.

So, what has been done this past seven or so days:

- Wrote and added sentences for the pseudo exit/location change tiles in the newly added location;

- Introduced some general optimisations to the code and in-game scenes;

- Combat action IDs for belt-related items were incorrectly marked as ‘defend_’ – they are now correctly marked as ‘belt_’ (this shouldn’t have any grave implications, because belt-related actions are not saved in the save file unlike the ‘permanent’ actions such as magic, skill, or escape actions);

- Wrote and added a number of sentences with a 10% chance of appearing when stepping on an empty traversable tile in the second location. I'm still searching for a distinct narrative style, and would greatly appreciate feedback, but judging by the number of people who have actually tried the game, I'm not receiving it any time soon;

- I decided to switch off saving on game exit. Honestly, I should have done it the moment I implemented the temporary save button. Now, the saving will only happen on location change (including returning to Main Menu, though I can switch this off, too) or on the save button click – having the progress update every time I switched off the game in the editor really got in the way of testing. Later on, when I begin implementing multiple save files (or rather, ACTUAL save files, because at the moment, the progress is saved to a 'system' save file that is meant to remember the game state behind the scenes; basically, a hidden autosave existing exclusively to transfer data between levels), I’ll introduce checkpoints for convenience;

- Got sidetracked a little and added a background to the levels. Sounds easy and pointless, but there’s actually a twist - the colour of the background changes based on of the time of day, so you can tell at a glance whether it’s morning, day, evening, or night depending on the ambience. The background follows the player object, so if you notice a huge panel shifting position, then it's the background. I wanted it to resemble a wooden surface, and this sprite was the only suitable one I had. And yes, I tried tying the sprite to the player character object, but it looked like ass when it hopped alongside the character, so I just made the sprite follow the object smoothly;

- For testing purposes, made the traversable tiles in the first test area take from 10 to 15 minutes per step in order to test the aforementioned background functionality;

- Fixed a bug that showed 24 hours instead of 0 hours (and no, I’m not planning to add AM/PM option at the moment, sorry in advance);

- Tried to apply a ‘filter’ to background images in the dialogue and combat modes, to ‘reflect’ the current day part by assigning the colour of the newly added location background to them – will test it out and decide whether it looks okay (I made the filter very slight; so slight, in fact, that it’s barely noticeable most the time);

- Revised and implemented the dialogue that takes places prior to the first combat sequence in the demo proper;

- Fixed (or rather, updated) the dialogue system code – skipping text was prone to breaking because in some cases the controlling bools couldn’t keep up with what was going on in the other classes. I introduced a frame-long delay to ensure that everything worked in a timely manner;

- Realised that the current dialogue/combat backgrounds had incompatible sizes relative to the size of the container they were displayed in, so I sat down and prepared new pictures – I like the new ones better, so it doesn’t even feel like a waste of time, honestly. I also prepared an extra one that fits the second part of the dialogue better;

Next week, I'll look into music management (to switch to and from battle music) and will also try to polish the combat system a bit. At the very least I want to finally start using formulas that take into account the characters' stats. Maybe I'll manage to come up with something else. I don't think I will be able to finish the Outside Church location next week (there's still one big branched dialogue that will take place after the fight), but I will at least start revising the texts.

Anyway, I'll see you next Sunday, unless I run into a game-breaking bug and will have to release a fix update earlier.