Weekly Report (Jan. 28th)

Hi.

Wow, would you look at that, I released an update on a Sunday!

Feels nostalgic, haha! But in all seriousness, there's no point in waiting until tomorrow, because I won't be adding anything apart from what has already been added this week. The update is small again, I only added the obligatory 'level up to continue' sequence, supplementary dialogues, level logic scripting and some assorted things.

So, what exactly are we talking about here:

- Readjusted the logic for the notifications’ speed, again. I hope - this time - there won’t be any problems with fluctuating velocity;

- Redesigned the logic for the functionality meant to determine where the protagonist will be spawned upon loading a scene, and immediately ran into problems. I have no idea WHY and HOW the previous iteration did not cause errors, but the new one did. I’m not super content with the way I handle this. I basically hold the last player position in every location in a save file. Under this system, I manually change the last player position in a specific location, so upon starting a level, the program checks what the current level is as well as what the last player position in this location was, and the player is teleported to that position. I wish I knew how other games handled this;

- I somehow messed up eastern and western hallways in the lodgings area, so location strings were also misplaced; 

- Programming the level up ‘tutorial’ didn’t go quite as planned. Initially, I wanted to let the buttons remain active and invoke custom notifications that would tell the player what needed to be done first, but due to technical restrictions and my personal ineptitude I had to simply disable the buttons and make those disabled buttons show tooltips with instructions;

- But yeah, I finished implementing that ‘tutorial’, with all the necessary supplementary dialogues and stuff;

- Introduced another layer to save files - now I also store global ‘game state variables’. Basically, it’s a bunch of booleans and integers that represent player choices as well as other variables that would allow more nuanced scripting;

- Started revising the dialogues for the next week’s tasks;

- Since I wouldn’t be able to revise all past-level-up dialogues - let alone implement them - by the end of the week, I decided to tinker with the audio controller. I changed the logic a bit. Now, SFX and Button audio clips will play in newly generated audio sources, meaning that the clips won’t get abruptly cut short because the audio source was forced to play another clip. In other words, the clips will play in full and will be able to overlap.

And that's it.

Next version will be 0.3.0. I'm still thinking where 0.4.0 should start. Without spoiling too much, it should probably be reserved for the moment when the player returns to the tavern after completing the task Lawrence will ask for the protagonist to do. Then, there will be some tutorial stages in the tavern, and then the demo will end. But trust me, this is still far off. It's not like the demo will be released before March. Heck, I'd be lucky if I finished before April, honestly. But we'll see. This is something the future me will be dealing with. As for the current me, I'm signing off.

See y'all next week!