Progress Report (January)

Salut, everyone!

January was ass. Or was it ass just for me? Last year, I naively thought I would feel more motivated after the New Year’s celebrations, that I would be more productive. Yeah, right. Turns out, neither happened. In fact, last month was so spectacularly mediocre in terms of work done that this report is going to be rather short.

I didn’t touch the dialogue system. At all. Five months into assembling this new game version, and I haven’t even started on any of the major gameplay systems. Wow. Great. In my defense, when I sat down to outline what needed to be done to work on that system, I realized that the current build lacked so many adjacent features that I simply couldn’t work on it properly.

So, a decision was made to focus on the following:

First, I introduced characters to the project. Most of the core functionality has been implemented - better and more refined than it used to be - though some features are understandably missing. Inventories, combat actions, protagonist-related data such as lists of recipes, scenes, etc - all of those are absent, because, well, the inventory system doesn’t exist yet, in this version. And neither does the combat system. Or the crafting system. Scene-viewing functionality, too. These shall turn up later.

Next, I added party management functionality. The classes were redesigned, though not as drastically as the character-related ones. Perhaps, ‘optimized’ would be a better word to use here, but that would diminish the work I’d done with them.

But what really ate up time was work on the party panels - the ones that display characters from player and counterpart parties - and making sure they worked smoothly with the new character and party classes. Internally, they are now significantly different from their previous iterations, but in a good way. There are still a few things I wanted to add, but I got sidetracked…

…by redesigning the time and money buttons on the utility panel. That clock algorithm alone took me at least two full days to figure out. I had many battles with ChatGPT trying to get it right because, let me remind you, I am, in fact, a big dumdum, and anything remotely maths-related leaves me shellshocked. And boy, did I need maths there. But I got it working in the end, so that’s a win.

Finally, I made smaller upgrades and optimizations to the existing code. I also improved the set of debug action buttons on the central traverse tile to help with testing new functionality.

Hopefully, now I can finally commence work on the dialogue system. It’s long overdue. I didn’t expect it would take this long to reach this point. I’ve been working on this version for five months now. Games of this scale are made in less than half a year from scratch, yet here I am, struggling with an already existing project *sighs*

Anyway, see you in March. The new development build is attached. I haven’t really tested it, but it should be fine.