Weekly Report (Feb. 12th)

Heya.

To nobody's surprise I got distracted this week, and didn't even touch the perk system. I wanted to, at minimum, add a placeholder perk, but I ran into a couple of annoying bugs that took the time slot today. I spent the previous week refactoring all level scripts and writing new/retouching existing flavour texts, both those that are invoked via action buttons and those that appear randomly while traversal.

Here's the general list of what I was up to:

- Wrote and implemented some extra flavour texts for demo levels, specifically for the ground floor of the tavern, except the kitchen (the access to which I blocked, since that area will only become accessible later);

- Decided to remake the levels a little bit - not drastically, just added disabled action buttons that imply that the player at some point will be able to change locations/do stuff there and reordered some action buttons;

- Decided to change the way I organise level scripts - previously, I added the logic in bulk to the same overarching class per level, but now I’ll rely on private nested classes within those classes for different scenarios, making level logic more modular. It’ll help me (or other people, for that matter) navigate through level logic easier in the long run, when each level will have to act differently depending on what quests have been completed, what time of day it is, etc;

- Designed an additional script for traverse tiles that makes tile sprite/icon sprite perform a pulsing effect - as per usual, I simply couldn’t not overcomplicate things, but I quite like the end result. I can control when to start/stop the pulsing, as long as I have the reference to the tile, quite easily. Now I can make tile icons more animated and make the player see at first glance which tiles are ‘interactable’ and which are purely decorative;

- Decided to increase the speed of dialogue skipping - for a couple reasons. For one, it's easier to playtest that way. For another, if a player decided to skip a dialogue, chances are they'd prefer to finish the dialogue sooner, rather than sit and wait until the nods are finally scrolled through - there's still a little gap between nod scrolling, because not having a gap may result in technical problems, which I would like to avoid;

- Discovered and fixed a bug that prevented the 'Sleep' action button in the Test Town level from becoming enabled in case the player finished the sleep tutorial in the same play session. I still don't understand how Unity stores the game values. Let me just say that I find it strange that the sleeping UI retains changes made to it in a different scene, even though I don't use DontDestroyOnLoad on the UI, each scene has it's own UI instance. Maybe the changes are applied to the UI prefab for some reason? I don't even know what to think;

- Discovered and fixed a bug that prevented an area the player was in from appearing after starting another play session - the same problem as above, game values storing. If you entered a 'hide/reveal' area (the protagonist's room, for example; the kitchen will also have the similar functionality), then saved/reloaded the scene, the area would stay enabled (since the game 'remembered' the last revealed area). But if you closed the game and then reloaded the save, the area would stay hidden until the player moved to a different tile. I only discovered this by pure chance, because I rarely close the game and then reload it. Hopefully, a forced update of the currently active area shortly after the scene starts will sort the issue.

And that's it, I think. Maybe I forgot to mention something, but if I did, then those changes were so minor that I didn't even bother to remember and write them down. This week, I WILL ABSOLUTELY work on the perk system, and will also try to push the story forward a bit. Basically, the protagonist will have to go to the lodgings area, play a dialogue, then descend again, and complete a small 'party assembling' tutorial akin to that in the Test Town level - accept Gaspar into party. Then, we will head for the market.

That's the plan anyway. See y'all next week.