Weekly Report (May 26th)

Heya.

0.5.1 is finally here, coming a week later than anticipated, but a day earlier than builds are usually posted. A perfectly balanced release, as all things should be. As one might have expected, I finished up what I had started last week, namely worked with combat strings and autosave/scenes management, as well as tested the game and fixed the bugs. And oh boy, there were some. One of them even soft-locked the game in the market location. I have no idea why that happened mechanically, but I found out what caused the issue. Removing the tumour resolved the issue, the patient appears to be perfectly functioning now.

Anyway, here's the list of changes:

- Finished up the string replacement code I mentioned in the previous report - it is now possible to inject action performer's and action target's names, as well as select branching strings based on either performer's or target's sex and race. Basically this: "{Performer} hit {Target} with {p_his/her/its} weapon, making the {t_man/woman/beast} recoil in pain". Along those lines;

- Rewrote older combat action strings, as well as wrote the variations for the new weapons - at first, I was trying to be fancy about it and wrote rather long, 'immersive' strings, but the more I did it, the more I realised how taxing that was. In the end, I decided to just write one generic string for all combat actions I have for the existing weapons. It is possible to write more strings in the future, actions feature lists of strings that are chosen randomly;

- I forgor to update the in-game storages last week - they are updated now;

- Fixed a bug that prevented the current and previous scenes from saving in the save file - in fact, I had to spend over a whole day working solely on scene management because of how half-baked my previous effort was;

- There was a bug in the market that added more steps to the market step counter than needed, which broke the level's logic, making it impossible to progress the quest - the player was basically stuck after the Zondok dialogue, even the movement buttons were disabled;

- Changed the logic that managed the leave town tile in the testing town level - it relied on the function that broke the market sequence, so I had to prepare a different solution to make the action button not interactive/interactive depending on the state of the testing quest.

That's it. I will be working on the combat mode next week. No forecasts. I don't know how much I'll be able to achieve in a week's time. We shall see.

See you next time.