Progress Report (December)

Hello and Happy New Year, everyone!

December was a hectic month for me. For much of it, I felt like I was underperforming. Just a week ago, I doubted I’d complete the functionality I had set out to finish within the month. Yet, to my surprise, I managed to cover nearly everything in the end: the top panel’s functionality, the right-hand side panel’s functionality, and the associated logic.

First and foremost, I implemented the location panel and the location window - the former being the top UI panel, and the latter being the toggleable window that contains the text description of the area the player is currently in. The window's logic has been revamped; it now features a ScrollRect component, allowing it to display longer texts without shrinking the font size.

Next, I completely rewrote the music player logic. Previously, it was not only cumbersome but also riddled with flaws. Coupled with significant changes to the audio management system, I had to rebuild it from scratch, which ate up around a week of my time. The end result isn’t perfect, in my view. While I haven’t encountered any bugs, I can’t shake the feeling that I might have overlooked something that could break unpredictably. Here’s hoping it’s just my paranoia acting up.

I also reworked the action button logic - the same system I overhauled not so long ago. After giving it another critical look, I found myself dissatisfied and decided to revamp it once again. Now, I couldn’t be happier with it. I even considered adding multiple button presets and implemented a rough prototype, but ultimately decided it was an unnecessary complication. I couldn’t find a natural place to add buttons for toggling presets, and attaching them to the edge of the action button panel felt clunky. Perhaps I’ll revisit the idea later, but for now, it feels like unnecessary feature creep.

Finally, I implemented the reputation management and backlog systems. Thanks to the new text management logic, the backlog now supports dynamic language changes - so if the player decides to switch languages during the game, the entries will be translated accordingly rather than deleted. However, I skipped the portion of the backlog system that allows concatenating entries into one. This functionality will only be required for the combat system (to gather information about the changes that occurred during a combat round and consolidate it into a single long entry), which is still some time away. When the time comes, I’ll revisit it to ensure it works as intended and doesn’t just sit there.

Beyond these major updates, I made numerous smaller changes - optimizations and tweaks to existing features - that I didn’t bother cataloguing individually.

Oh, and I’ve also decided to publish the current progress build so you can see how the new project is shaping up for yourself.

Looking ahead to January, my focus will shift to characters and the dialogue system, which should be more than enough to keep me occupied for the next 30-ish days. To make dialogues work, I’ll need to establish basic functionality for characters, parties, and possibly even the quest system. We’ll see how it goes.

For now, though, I’ll be signing off!