Weekly Update/Preview July 10-17 (Patreon)

This week has felt somewhat unusual. Nonstandard in the amount of bugs, troubleshooting, and bugfixing that has been going on behind the scenes. As a result, it feels like I'm not getting done as much as I would like. If I avoid panicking about that and purposely inject logic instead though, I guess that's always going to be the case, huh? If I look back and think "I got X amount of stuff done" the thought of "yeah but you could have gotten X+Y amount done instead you lazy so and so" is always going to be a thing that I can think.

Whether I SHOULD think that or not is up in the air, but we keep on going regardless. Gotta do what I can.

Bug Stuff

Might as well talk about it a bit. I'll try not to get too incredibly technical on how all the event stack stuff works behind the scenes, though you'll have to tell me if you'd actually rather hear me babble about complex stuff instead. 

Prior to version 13, the event stack that manages multiple effects being triggered and triggering other effects and so on had a safeguard to prevent the same effect being triggered with the exact same information more than once at a time. Going into version 13, this safeguard was... Not actually removed, but the information stored in the objects within the stack was expanded on enough that the safeguard almost never actually works. To a degree, I knew that making those structural changes would break the safeguard, but IDEALLY, properly implementing status effects/skills/curses/etc. would mean that it wouldn't matter.

But uh... Yeah. We don't live in an ideal world.

Some (but not all) of the crash bugs that have been reported and looked into have been a result of that. Things that were implemented incorrectly but weren't caught due to the safeguard being there previously. Removing it exposed that and allows me to fix things, which is good. It just doesn't really look good when the game is unstable and more liable to crash now than it was before.

Unlucky 13, I guess. I'll have to keep it in mind if/when we get to beta 13. 

(Speaking of, I'm feeling like switching over to beta is probably going to be pretty soon, if only because there aren't a huge amount of additional gameplay systems I want to add in beyond what exists now. That's a discussion/post for later though.)

Moving on to tweets from the last week...

Lucky

I think this kind of thing is fun to have in the game, though I also probably should avoid confirming or denying if it does anything at all.

It is a mystery.

Skill Upgrading Window

"Yo dawg, I heard you like" meme here.

I've actually hated the way that the changes to a skill when ranking it up were displayed for quite a while. I think the game looks good in most cases, but I have also gotten a lot of completely valid UI criticism here and there. It's easy to forget that I'm not using any framework beyond Godot itself, and thus there is are a LOT of things that I've had to make decisions on that people probably don't even notice or think about unless they end up getting in the way. 

There's a fair amount of learning as I go, with many things I made early on in the game's development now being in a state of "it works, but I would probably do it differently if I did it again". The primary message box scene for the game is one of those very early things. It was made such that displaying confirmation dialogs, status effects, skills, curses, and several other things are all done with the same basic window, just with different modes showing and hiding different UI parts.

In some ways, this is good. I think it works fine for displaying a singular effect or message. For comparing the difference between two different effects that both need to be visible at the same time it has been... Not so good.

So, I finally got down to fixing it, and I think this conveys things a lot better.

Dungeon Background

I don't think many people go back and read the intro much, if at all, so maybe what this tweet refers to isn't quite so obvious.

The majority of backgrounds used in the game are AI generated and further edited by me to fit a certain art style/idea. Because that's always been the case, and the game has been in development for a while, that means that there has also been time for the general development and increased availability of AI image generation.

Many old backgrounds use old models of Stable Diffusion and as a result, end up looking more abstract. This seems especially apparent to me when looking back at a lot of the backgrounds in the intro cutscene. That's not necessarily good or bad, but it means that there's a choice to be made on if I want to stick with that style rather than take advantage of other options to create somewhat more grounded looking images.

Just more of that art direction stuff I guess.

In any case, the text itself ISN'T from the intro cutscene, so putting aside the previous paragraphs, this tweet also serves the purpose of suggesting an upcoming part of the plot. There's more to be seen and done regarding the Inquisitor's visions of the dungeon, even though they're now very much embroiled in the situation.

And that's the end of images from this week. Even though there were only 3 things posted, hopefully there's some more insight here that proves interesting. If not, well, I'm probably far too easy to drag conversation out of in discord and whatnot, so feel free to do that!