Weekly Report (June 24th)

Bonjour.

Maybe my inability to present a basic, yet functional, combat perk system last week was a blessing in disguise. I have changed the approach, and now, the system is in a more or less bearable state. I'm still not super content with the system as of this moment, a better game developer would have done a much better job, but hey, I can't jump higher than I physically can. For something that has been done by me, the system is good enough.

This week was pretty much exclusively dedicated to combat perks, but there are some other changes compared to the previous build.

Here's the list of changes:

- Polished active combat perks handling - I changed the logic compared to the previous week, which gave me move control over tracking the perks in combat. Perks should now correctly fire and get removed at appropriate times;

-Modified queue portraits - now those are correctly cleared upon the next battle (before, the perks visibly appeared on the first battle sequence and then stayed visible the moment you started the next sequence), plus they now show what active perks the combatants have on them. Hovering the mouse pointer over a perk will show the perk's description, just like when you hover the pointer over the perk stored on the party character panel;

- Fixed sprite masks - some masks needed a bit of fixing;

- Introduced combat actions and perks backlogging - I decided to stop adding the strings shown during the combat in the text box and, instead, began to add to backlog the brief descriptions of what the characters do to each other or what perks do to them. Those descriptions are rather bland, but I find this format better suited for combat. There's room for improvement, but for now, it's good enough, I find;

- Made some minor fixes in various places.

I wanted to make queue portraits fade in and out on combat start/end, but got too caught up with other things that I prioritised over a blatantly cosmetic feature. I will probably tackle this the first thing this week. After that, I will probably try to redesign the combat actions code. Like I'd said last week, the code is obnoxious. I hope to make it more palatable. The week after that I will dedicate to characters' decision-making in combat. And after that I will finally return to the demo story. We haven't been to The Lonely Marigold for far too long at this point.

See y'all next week.