GSW stuff that I've spent too much time on (Patreon)

For several days (a week?) my right ear has been plugged or something, I don't know what it is, maybe ear wax. I've been using some ear wax softener stuff that seems to be helping. Anyway, I haven't been using my headphones as much because it's weird to animate voiced stuff without them (and I'm a lot more comfortable when no one can hear the weird degeneracy I'm working on).

So I started thinking about game dev stuff and picked up where I left off on Gyra saves the world. The way I was coding stuff was a bit weird and coming back to it after awhile of not touching it was... interesting. So I started with something simple which was to get the equipment change stuff properly displaying final stats and then things got out of control from there.

You can see that here in this video (which also shows saving/loading)

https://youtu.be/ywyxvwP8JoY?si=A7lmTBGEydn54V47

-Oh yeah I got the saving/loading system working. Most important is stuff is saved and loaded properly, there's likely stuff I'm missing/haven't done yet but that'll be added to the save/load methods as I go.

-I got the absolute basics of a shop system implemented. You can buy/sell stuff and a shop keeper can have their own list of items they sell, their own markup and stuff.

-I also decided to switch to on-field encounters similar to Chrono Trigger. The reasoning was inspired by a chat I was having about CT with my brother. We both love CT and we're always talking about what made it so great and one thing he always mentions is how the "dungeons" never feel like dungeons, it just feels like you're exploring the world. And after all this time, playing and beating CT dozens of times over the decades, I finally realized why: It's because the monster encounters are seamlessly integrated into the world.

Sure there's some spots where you touch a hot spot and monsters appear out of nowhere in CT, but there's so many places where monsters are interacting with the world. They pop out of bushes, they circle around rocks, they're swimming in the sewer water... and when you get into a battle, you don't change maps.

In my dumb RPG, I'd like to have the same kind of memorable experience. Where you don't feel like you're walking down a hallway with monsters in it (or even worse, a hallway with invisible monsters in it aka random encounters!). You feel like you're just exploring places and some places happen to have monsters in them.

Thankfully, the way I programmed my battle system made it relatively easy to make battles happen in the same room.

What I'd like to do is instead of attempting to make anything too elaborate is just get all the features I'd need implemented to make something on the level of a good but forgotten SNES/PS1 rpg, then make a tech demo (with lewd in it. Imagine like a dungeon with 4 rooms and some battles, a shop, a couple cutscenes and a very lewd FMV).

Other not really noticeable, boring things done are:

-Pathfinding movement (using the built in game maker A* grid pathfinding, I just convert that to a list of gird movements/directions that actors move about using automatically).

-Fixed a variety of small menu bugs. One that's been killing me is sometimes the cursor would go 1 or -4 options too far if the player wildly presses the direction keys and the scroll offset would mess up, that's fixed.

-Finally separated window layer depth from their interaction depth (menu depth re-orders on menu's closing so they don't overlap while the previous menu is closing, ignore the messed up colors, it's the gif). Before whatever menu was the controller's focus was drawn on top no matter what.

-Mostly finished modifying the battle system to use a state-based approach which I should have been doing in the first place but didn't for some dumb reason.

Immediately after this I'm posting an update about the parasaur and raptors stuff because I've been working on that too, not as much as I should though... I apologize for indulging in my game dev urges, but once I get a hit of feeling good about a programming related task, I can't stop. Like I'll begin a day thinking "okay, I'm going to implement *one simple feature* and then no more programming today" but next thing I know I do a ton more stuff and it's been all day. And I get barely any animation done because I can't get out of "programming mode"