Weekly Report (Feb. 26th)

Hey.

I'm kinda late, huh. It's been a hectic day, plus I got a bit carried away with last-minute changes. Do I even need to say that I didn't really fulfill my plan for the week fully, lmao. As usual, I did whatever but the thing I outlined previous Monday, or rather, I only did half of the planned thing. I was going to implement the Gaspar dialogue downstairs (without the need to add him to the player party, just the dialogue part), but that will be postponed to this week.

So, why exactly did I not implement a simple dialogue? Well, here's the list of the things I've done this week:

- Revised text for the following stage of the demo - including the dialogue upstairs, downstairs, and outside the tavern;

- Made an oopsie, which resulted in me having to spend a whole day fixing it;

- The oopsie was related to the fact that I reimagined the internal structure of scenes, making them far more organised and easier to navigate in the Unity editor, and was due to the fact that I deleted a prefab with the references to character storage, so I had to go through all dialogues and manually fix the missing references, as well as make all manner of changes that needed to be done because of the scene structure changes;

- Along the way made some adjustments to the logic of some levels and fixed occasional dialogue typos;

- Spent an obscenely long time renaming dialogue encounters/branches/nods for clarity - they are not as monstrously named right now;

- Implemented two new dialogues in the lodgings area of the tavern;

- Made several huge improvements to game mode switching as well as toggleable windows switching;

- Fixed an oversight that resulted in the dialogue mode images bugging out if they got flipped rapidly - their initial positions would get overwritten every time flipping happened, so if the flipping happened in quick succession, the images would bounce further up, without resetting their ‘true’ initial positions;

- Only now did I realise that in the starting void scene the values on the left panel were not hidden, so you could see them before they were supposed to get revealed during the tutorial - I only hid them in the inside church scene, even though that panel was, and still is, very much present before that scene starts. Right now, the values are hidden right after the character creation;

- Fixed a bug that forced the first nod of a dialogue to get skipped in case the player finished the previous scene during the dialogue mode with the skip button active;

- Realised that I forgot to restore health and stamina of characters who are not in the player party as of the moment of sleeping, hence Gaspar retained his health and stamina from the day before - now I restore the health and stamina of all protagonists and party members in the character storage;

- Changed the way loot containers are handled after combat. Previously, I manually assigned the loot action button after fights, which was a very bad decision, because it had me look for workarounds to juggle the need to provide the player with the option to loot the container (namely, after Test Town duel and after fighting wolves/bear in Test Forest) and not mess up the following event logic. The solution I found is beautiful in its simplicity - after the fight, if the player loses, they are pushed into Traverse mode and the lose event fires; however, if the player wins, then 1) if there’s no loot in the encounter’s container, the player is pushed into Traverse mode and the win event fires; 2) if there is loot, then the container opens, and the win event fires right after the player closes said container and gets pushed into Traverse mode;

And that's it. The current plan for this week is to finish up the dialogues for the tavern (both inside and outside), and then start reimagining the traverse tiles functionality. Yeah, I've just had a brilliant idea as to how to make the tiles better and more convenient. The downside is, I will have to reassign everything after making the changes, which will also take at least an evening - maybe a whole day, given my attention span.

And with that, I bid you adieu. Will see you next week!