Weekly Report (Jan. 8th)

Hello, everyone.

Another week, another disappointment. I fell into the black hole named refactoring and redesigning. This week, there's no new and exciting content, unfortunately. You are still confined to the ground floor of The Lonely Marigold, and though I made some small adjustments to the existing levels, they are so minor, you probably won't even notice them. In fact, they are so small that I didn't even distinguish what has been done in the list below.

Speaking of lists, here's the list of changes from this week:

- Greatly refactored and modified dialogue mode-related code. Now the code looks cleaner (previously it was a huge - huge! - mess, since it was one of the first systems I designed for the game, only preceded by the tile traversal system; it’s arguably the cleanest looking piece of code I have right now). Aside from that, I mostly implemented what I mentioned in the previous weekly report, namely the shaking effect when a sprite is flipped horizontally, and sprite disappearance mirroring sprite appearance, aka performing effects before disappearing. I said mostly, because I wanted to introduce the same shaking effect when the sprite disappeared, but it turned out, that the disappearing was so quick that you could barely notice any shaking before the sprite got completely transparent. I tried putting a delay before the sprite disappearance, but it led to visual inconsistencies. Long story short, when a sprite disappears now, it performs a fading effect, without shaking.

- Made a significant change to combat logic concerning how the characters identify themselves as allies/enemies. Granted I didn’t break anything, you won’t see a difference in this version. The bottom line is, previously the combat controller used character class recognition to identify targets, but now the targets are sorted in two lists, one being allies and the other enemies. Previously, it was impossible to ‘switch’ between combat parties. Now, if I were to put a companion in the enemies list, that companion would treat their allies as enemies and their enemies as allies. This comes with two major drawbacks: first, your ‘unconfused’ companions will start attacking their former companion as though they were their enemy all along (since they are in the enemies list now), and enemies would try to defend your ‘confused’ companion as though they were their ally all along (since they are all in the same list, hence are in the same 'team'). What I think I’ll do in the future is introduce additional checks during NPC target selection stage to take into account whether the character is part of player party/counterpart party, while letting the player attack the ‘confused’ companion regardless. I envision having magic and skill moves that would have a chance to turn hostile companions back to non-hostile, and locking out your hostile companions would make it impossible to use said magic and skills on your 'confused' companions. Ideally, NPCs should also have the ability to revert the ‘confused’ status, but that would require a complete remake of the decision-making code. Which I’m planning to do anyway, because as of right now, NPCs’ decisions are completely random.

- Oh yeah, I made it possible for the player to control all party members and even enemies. By design, I’m reluctant to let the player have direct control over party members by default (I'm aiming for something like Persona 3), but I concede that some may want to have full control over what happens in battle. If you, for some reason, wish to try and control everyone in combat, press Backspace during combat to switch the required bools to true;

- Made some assorted tweaks in regards to character stats handling and showcasing, as well as introduced some QoL features that are supposed to help me work with the characters in Unity Editor better and quicker;

- Changed the way characters are renamed during dialogues - previously I simply had identical instances of the same character with different names, but I sat on it and decided that cluttering my character storage with nearly identical characters is not dandy;

- Refactored (more like redesigned, honestly) quest handling code - I ‘hope’ it didn’t break anything. It’s one of those systems that can break, and you won’t even notice it being broken at first glance. At least testing showed that quest progression works fine, so I hope that I won't run into problems in the future;

- Updated the inspection doll code (the doll that appears when you click on a character’s portrait) - it may have had problems for quite some time, but it should be crisp now. Unfortunately (or fortunately), there will be no more automatic hopping between player party doll and counterpart party doll during dialogue mode - I made it impossible to scroll dialogue nods if any toggleable window is active, including the inspection doll, thus you will have to close it before a dialogue can be continued;

- Actually, I decided to do the same to action buttons as well - instead of closing the active window on action button clicking, they now become not interactable for as long as the active toggleable window is, well, active;

- By the way, I made sure that if you are skipping dialogues, when a toggleable window becomes active, the scrolling will stop, and will only resume after the window is closed. I contemplated making the skipping button inactive when a toggleable window is active, but decided to spend a little more time adjusting the logic and permitting the player to change the skipping status. Basically, if you activate a toggleable window and then press the skipping button, upon closing that window, the dialogues will begin to skip, and vice versa;

- Added more diverse restrictive notifications instead of generic ‘Unavailable!’;

- Added miscellaneous adjustments to tutorial levels;

And that sums it up. I hope to finally push the story forward, but there's still some things in code that I want to adjust. I'll see if I can deal with those things quickly. Even If I don't, I'm adamant to at least implement the lodgings floor of the tavern, even if it won't have anything interactive.

As always, I'll see y'all next week!