Weekly Report (Jan. 1st)

Hey, y'all!

A-a-and it's 2024.

I would lie if I told you that I could focus on the development past week. Maybe I'm burning out. Also, I'm feeling unwell. I think I may have suffered the onset of carpal tunnel syndrome. At least the symptoms suggest as much. My hand is mostly fine right now, but I fear yet another bout may happen in the future.

All I managed to do is implement a new dialogue sequence, fix some bugs, and introduce small changes to the already existing systems.

All in all, here's the list of changes:

- Prepared sprites for The Lonely Marigold ground floor interior, as well as body sprites/portraits for two new characters;

- Revised and implemented a new dialogue sequence that involves said characters;

- Fixed a bug that disabled the opacity screen, which made it impossible to use the mouse to drag camera in map mode;

- I decided to disable action buttons on scene start and only make them interactable when the fading-in is done - if there was some action available right from the scene start, you could break the game logic. For example, you could leave the tavern before the new dialogue started. Even though leaving the tavern is a debug action and will be removed/reimagined later, I concede there could appear similar problems;

- Edited all of the currently available character sprites to be turned in the same direction - thanks to this, the portraits in the player party panel will be turned to the right (default), and the same character portraits in the counterpart party panel will be turned in the opposite direction;

- Introduced the ability to flip displayed sprites during dialogue mode - for now, only the ability is implemented, I haven't yet manually switched where the sprites have to be flipped in existing dialogues. I'll do it tomorrow;

- Generally cleaned some bits of the dialogue system-related code. I also want to change the system a little in the future - I want to make sprites shake as they disappear, like they do on appearing. Right now, they simply switch off momentarily. Also, maybe I may be able to shake the sprites in case they get flipped. But for that I'll need to change things in the current system.

That's it, I guess. I haven't recorded all the changes I made this week, so I may have missed something.

See y'all next week.