01/05 Patreon Devlog

Hi everyone!

Hopping in with this week's devlog and update! I have no idea where this week went but it feels like it somehow passed me over and I managed to not experience most of it..@_@

Let's jump into the update!

Writing:

This week I did finish Caleb Chapter Four and got started on Chapter Five. The route has passed 33%. So yay for that!

That said, I got massively distracted by other dev stuff this week and that's about all the writing I did!

Art:

We received one new completed background and I haven't heard from the other BG artists in about a week. I expect I'll hear from them by the end of the weekend since they're all on about a week-per-BG schedule! 

I actually did a weird amount of "art" this week.

But it was all related to screens and GUI.

I'll get more into that when I talk about coding because designing buttons and screen BGs always tends to be tied into coding. 

Mostly the designs I've done were related to flowcharts and their implementation. But I also wanted to take a look at other screens and spruce them up a little.

In some cases it was necessary though. 

For instance the "side menu" in the game needed a redesign. Currently, the player can't access the galleries or glossary from within the game and I've been wanting to change that. With the addition of flowcharts, I decided it was going to be necessary to add an "Extras" button so the player can get to that screen directly from within the game.

The side menu was a little small for another button so I ended up needing to make it a little bigger, which led to a slight re-design overall.

I also decided to redesign the background image being used in most of the menus. The one we currently have was really kind of a placeholder. That background is not going to be used anywhere in the game so it's sort of unrelated to anything else. 

Now that we actually have more BGs, I wanted to just use different ones for different screens.

The design of that page was also creating some issues in setting up some screens so a redesign of the BG means that problem goes away. But it does require me to adjust a lot of the screens and get the text and buttons centred a little better.

That is more of a coding thing, but because the game uses something called an imagemap, it also requires me to re-save some of the images instead of just adjusting the screen position.

Another example of where I had to actually change and re-save images is the name list on the side of some of the screens. Because it's an imagemap, the entire list is saved as a single image. That means I can't just add three new names in the code and change the position of the others. I have to actually redo the frame so it's bigger, add the names, then resave the entire image….then recode the coordinates of the hotspots. 

So...while to both do and talk about…

I've been working on a lot of that sort of thing over the last few days.

Coding: 

I've also been working on a lot of coding. I haven't implemented very much of the above re-configurations, so that is yet before me…

However, I did start breaking into the flowchart code. 

I got a working prototype going, which was really exciting…

Because of the way I settled on doing the images, I thought I was going to end up needing thousands (literally) of images across all the flowcharts in the game. As I played with the code, I settled on a method that will let me cut the number of images in half. Which was a nice discovery.

Unfortunately, I then ran into an issue where I wasn't able to swap between the flowcharts. I don't really know why. I still haven't worked out why it wasn't letting me switch between flowchart images. 

I tried multiple setups and none of them worked.

Eventually, I did settle on a way that works, though it's not a method I wanted to use because it necessitates having a "flowchart selection" screen.

So you click on "Extras", click on "Flowcharts", click on "Character Name" - and then you have access to all the different chapter flowcharts.

I was trying for click on "Extras" and immediately have access to all character names and chapters. This was the set up I really couldn't get to work.

Unfortunately, when you're coding something like this and encounter a problem, fixing it can become a huge time sink...and you sometimes end up with nothing to show for all that time. If I spend four hours trying to fix a problem and never come up with a solution, that's four hours...wasted, really.

That was kind of my day yesterday.

But, ultimately, I do have a working flowchart set up. It's not the one I wanted, but it works. It's functional - if a little more clunky than I wanted it to be.

Having to design a flowchart selection page is what really sent me on this spiral of sprucing up the UI in places. It's something I've actually wanted to do for a while now. This kind of thing is a bit tedious so it's easy to put it off or be satisfied with something less than what you want. But of course, getting into the designing and coding is a bit of a relief. So I'm glad to be doing it now.

As a side note, I did also implement the updated main menu. So that now looks totally different than it did!

Music:

We've now gotten all of our tracks from our composer. They're in WIP stage still, and need to be polished up and made to loop smoothly. But we have them, we've heard them and okayed each one.

Tobi expects to spend next week polishing them up and getting fully finished.

After that, I'll have to implement them. 

In some cases it'll be as easy as swapping out file names in the code but I think I will have to give the game a play through to make sure the new tracks work as well with where and how they're placed.

Upcoming Week:

If I assume that Tobi will spend the whole week polishing up the music, that gives me a week to try to implement all the UI updates. That way, when I get the new music, I can implement that and ship the demo update.

Since I've gotten this far, I think it would be nice if the demo update had all the new UI changes, and also had the flowcharts for the first four chapters. So I'm going to try to get all that done over the next few days.

There are some changes that are significant enough I'd like to toss it to beta testers for a few days just to make sure it's not throwing any errors. 

And then, yeah. That will be the demo update…

And it'll be back to writing after that.

So that's all for now! See you guys next week!