Progress Report (October)

Hey folks.

I'm not dead, and neither is the project. Like I mentioned some time ago, I’ve started working on a new project iteration - that’s the good news. The bad news is that October’s been a bit slow on progress.

Right now, I’m focused on the fundamentals, so I’m still pretty far from anything you’d actually be able to see, like game modes or entities. So far, the only visible features are the player object (with updated logic, no less), standing alone in the void, and some interface blocks.

I decided to try a new approach to UI handling. Instead of keeping UI elements always present but disabled, I’m now spawning them from prefabs and removing them when they’re no longer needed. I’m not sure if disabled elements even impact performance, but this setup will at least offer more flexibility for me. Panels, windows, and hints are now spawning as needed. Notifications were set up similarly in the demo, though with less efficient logic, so I’ll fit them in here as well when the time comes.

Another feature I added is a new way to store string/text component pairs. This should allow me to store composite multilingual strings and fully translate them on the go during gameplay. In the demo, this wasn’t possible, so if a language change happened mid-game, the current dialogue or combat string would remain untranslated until the next string appeared. Plus, there was no way to translate backlog entries, so pretty much all I could do was clear the backlog.

One more big change is the new logic for the transition screen - the one that is used to emulate fading in/out and display captions. I improved the script (a lot, to be fair) so the screen is now interactive; players will need to click to make it fade out when a caption is present, or it will disappear by itself if no caption was added on a fade-in. It can also display custom captions if needed, which may include sprites, for example.

Those are the main big changes. I’ve also made a lot of smaller updates, like a new input system, better supplementary scripts for UI elements, improved audio handling, and coroutine management. I’m not just copy-pasting old scripts; I’m rewriting each one almost from scratch for this new iteration.

But even with all this, I’ve only just scratched the surface. If I had to estimate, I’d say the new iteration is maybe 8-10% done, at best. At this pace, I’d need about a year to finish, but I’m aiming to speed things up. Funny I must say that considering I had hoped to finish the settings management by October’s end, but it looks like I’ll need extra few days to wrap things up.

So, yeah, progress is slowly happening. Not sure yet what’s next after dealing with the settings functionality - probably action buttons, then location/tiles, then dialogue mode, while working on the necessary scripts for each.

I’ll keep you posted on what I accomplish next month.