Weekly Report (Feb. 19th)

Hi.

Remember I wrote last time that I was planning to update the perk system and then move to the next stage of the demo? Forget I wrote anything. This past week was a disaster. There was an oversight in the time system that made me lose three days trying to figure out why the perk system didn't work. I had revised the system three times before - by pure chance, no less - I noticed that when the time changed via traversing, a day wasn't added to the day count.

In short, I lost so much time that I couldn't manage to do anything besides the perk system update and some minor things. 

Here is the list of most notable changes:

- Fixed a very stupid decision I made previously - I forced the player party to always reset on Test Town level start, regardless of whether this was the first time on that location or not. I shat a thousand bricks when I noticed that my party was being erased every time I loaded the level, thinking that something fundamental might have broken somewhere;

- There was a bug that soft-locked the Disclaimer scene if the player pressed buttons many times in quick succession - you would simply get stuck in that scene after the fade out, the main menu wouldn’t get loaded. While I have no idea what caused the problem, I implemented a workaround;

- Got rid of a number of redundant event invoke points related to party UI updating - I remember having problems with certain events not properly calling subscribed functions, forcing me to add additional invoke points. I tried the tactics of delayed invocation, and hopefully, nothing breaks and the UI will update as and when I want it to;

- Fixed a bug that skipped an extra day on day change ([Mondas => Wendas => Fridas] as opposed to proper [Mondas => Tuesdas => Wendas]);

- Noticed that day count didn’t increment on natural day change (only as the result of sleeping until next day) - this may well be the reason why I couldn’t make perks work. I sat there for three days, trying to understand why, no, - WHY - the perfectly sound logic for the timer didn’t work;

- It was. OF COURSE IT BLOODY WAS! How could calculations be correct when the current day remained unchanged?! Of course, they couldn’t be correct! I feel both pain and relief: pain ‘cause I spent about three days bashing my head against the wall, and relief ‘cause the bloody thing finally works;

- Prepared a picture for Gaspar’s room. Looks okay-ish, but not more than that;

- Got rid of redundant game-data-loading events;

- Introduced a slight delay that must occur before player collisions with traversable tiles begin to consume stamina, forward in-game time, or invoke backlog messages - without a delay, upon loading a level, the player is transferred to the position stipulated in the save file, forcing OnTriggerEnter event to fire, causing those things mentioned to take place before the player can even move by themselves;

- Fixed some small things. For example, the Money Added notification will no longer appear if the player spends money during trading (the function didn’t account for the fact that the value could be negative, thus taking money away, rather than adding them), made it possible to add a little health and stamina to enemies after a combat encounter in case those values were 0 (to simulate that you don’t straight up  kill the adversary but rather knock them out, like with the Angry Man in the tutorial fight), and some other miscellaneous things.

I feel mentally exhausted. I don't know what I will be doing this week. I can either continue working on the perks and finally introduce combat-related perks or continue the demo story. I will probably do the latter, because there will still be another fight later, which would be a great opportunity to work on combat perks as well as combat escaping.

I will see y'all next week.