Weekly Report (Mar. 18th)

Hi.

I'll try to be brief from now on. This is supposed to be a weekly report, not a weekly essay or something. I finished adjusting and testing the tile system, made some changes to the existing systems and levels, and tried to animate the UI a bit. Oh, also started working on the next location.

Here's the list of changes and development comments:

- The traverse tile system transition went smoothly, surprisingly so, - even if I did post a build previous week, the only problems would have been the protagonist bed tile’s icon stopping pulsating prematurely, the player being able to enter the kitchen, and the updated sets of flavour text strings not loading properly. Less luck with the test levels - now those needed a real workover, since those levels still rely on the legacy player recognition code;

- Just now realised that the flavour strings on Gaspar’s door urge the player to go downstairs before the relevant dialogue takes place. I could’ve handled it more gracefully, but decided to simply change the strings with neutral ones;

- Decided to give the player the choice to stay inside the tavern instead of being forcefully pushed outside - you can walk around with Gaspar in the party and read flavour text including the lines he speaks when interacting with the environment;

- Added keyboard shortcuts to the party composition window;

- Fixed a bug that made stamina restoring items add health points instead;

- Implemented a gradual filling of health/stamina/reputation bars, the fading of the portrait as well as the name on character switching - those are not super cool effects, but better than instant change. I also tried to make perks fade-in, but ran into a strange perk system incapability - I will implement the thing, but I’ll need to tweak the perk system;

- Ps. I’m aware of how junky bar filling is when the counterpart panel assigns a character when previously there was no active character - I will try to find a solution to fix the problem later;

- Made improvements to save data loading - saving and loading game data is a huge pain in the arse because of how I set it up at the beginning. It’s so bad that I’m still trying to amend things to this day;

- Cleaned up party-related code;

- Prepared the layout for the market location - at first, I wanted to include icons that indicated various street vendors, but after assigning the sprites, it felt like I somehow ‘limited’ the market square by having vendors in predefined tiles, even though my intention is to make an impression that the square has a lot of different vendors in different places, so I only left in the indoor shops.

Next week I'm planning to try and finish the UI changes, work on the perk system's downsides, write flavour strings for the new location, and possibly revise some more encyclopedia entries.

See you next week.