Check-in time! I have a healthy amount of content to show off this week, so let's get right into things!

Recently, I've been working on a few different things to do with the item framework. First up, I've tied in a whole list of different parameters to the danaume window in the bottom right corner of the player display! Not to get too into the technical side of things, but the system is fully modular! That means that if we do end up developing a new character window sometime in the distant future, it'll be as simple as plug and play.

I've also cleaned up items in preparation for some improvements to the inventory system. A bit technical, but the data for items used to be moved around a lot to display things, but now there's a separation between where the items are and where they're displayed. That's good because it both improves performance and makes way for the next change!

Lastly, I've also implemented drop-down menus for these item standins, so you can just click on them to get a full context menu. Not super complicated, but a step in the right direction.

For the future, Items in TFQuest are going to be dynamically equipped, meaning there are no fixed inventory slots. That means players can just drag and drop items overtop of the character window to have them equipped without hassle! Should make things a lot easier to keep track of when managing your inventory. Also planning to set up some tools to cleanly display these dynamically created slots. More in the technical digest on that if you're interested, but it'll just help to make things look pretty.

After that, I'm going to let items give their holders abilities. That should be a good intersection to bring items and the action system together.

That's about it for this session's devlog! If you'd like more information on the specifics of the technical side, check out the digest below! As always, I'll be around on Discord if you wanna chat about the project. Have a great day, and I'll see you next time!

Hey everyone! Thanks so much for the feedback last week.

I think I've come to the conclusion that the devlogs should mainly be for accountability. I'm happy to tease new features and things like that, but I found myself thinking that if I'm putting time into documenting for the devlogs, I should probably just be developing actual documentation!

I really like systems design (go figure) so it's pretty easy for me to get carried away and spill every detail in the devlogs. In future, if I have weeks where I want to share every detail of a system, I think I'm going to add a special 'technical digest' outside of the devlog that details the system in full. Past that, I'll check in once around every two weeks with a progress update.

So, progress update! The monster AI system has been fully implemented, and it's just in bugfixing now. That means that all of the actions are being imported from an external file, loaded, and executed in the game. Which is big! I'm not 100% sure how long it will take to finish testing this system, but I feel pretty close to ready to move on. 

After this, I'm likely going to integrate the monsters with the inventory system so I can let items 'donate' actions to monsters. This actually did feel a lot more comfortable to write, and I hope it's more comfortable to read too!

Have a great weekend,

Luna

Hey there, everyone!

I've been thinking recently that maybe I do devlogs too frequently. I want to remain accountable to everyone, but I also want to make sure that the updates I put out are substantial and worth reading. I thought the devlog I put out last week was really good, but quite simply, I'm just still working on that going forward.

I thought the best way to address this would be to put it forward to a poll - how often do you want to receive devlogs? Should I only put out long form devlogs or should I talk about every detail of my work?

Please let me know below! I'll consider the results of the poll before my devlog next week. Ultimately, I feel like it's important to prioritize subscribers in this poll, so the votes are weighted based on donation tier. I'd really like to get a sentiment analysis for how you're all feeling about the devlogs!

Thanks in advance :)

P.S. 
For anyone worried about my health from last week, thankfully it was a false alarm. I had some worrying symptoms that turned out to be less significant than originally thought. Phew!

Hello everyone! I hope you enjoy this week's devlog! It should give you a peek into what I've been doing the past few weeks. You can find it linked as a PDF file below!

Hope everyone enjoys their weekends!

Lots of new additions and the re-introduction of items back into the ecosystem!

First, containers. In all main rooms (for now), there are containers that will contain one item each. To access their inventory, click on them and use the ‘loot’ action. 

Due to a change in the structure of how items are implemented, currently it will look like there is nothing inside the slots. However, in the first slot of each container, there is a single item. These work as they did previously. You can still drag them over to the slot on the character window in order to equip them. The only thing that’s ‘wrong’ with them is that their slot icon is currently broken. This will be fixed in a future patch, but I ran out of time this week. 

I got through a lot of technical debt on the back-end too! The item system was designed to work for the demo, so I spent some time this week bringing it up to a point that’s closer to where I want it. At the moment, there’s no hooks that function in game due to a manual override. However, feel free to look through the files and see the hook structure as it currently is! There’s lots of interesting things in there pulled directly from the source of TQ via scripting.

The final thing to change this week is custom room shapes. They are now fully implemented and work in the same way as the custom map shapes do! I might at some point add holes and more to the map shapes, but for now they are just additive. The options are rectangle, circle, and polygon, and they follow the same rules as the map shape generation.

Next week, I’m going to focus on refining and fixing any bugs that get reported (as well as a few that I’ve found!) I want to address some continuing technical debt in how the item system works as well. I’ll talk more about that next week when I get that sorted!

For now, enjoy the release! It’s open to everyone, so the link will be in this devlog right here! I don’t have to make two posts for it anymore! :3
 
Have a good weekend everyone, and see you around! 

All the changes to SubscribeStar are completed! Let me know what you think or if there’s any problems with things that are still inaccessible. There’s no option to change post settings in bulk, so it’s totally possible I missed something.


This Week

This week, I worked on pretty much exactly what I had outlined: creating a player .json file and further testing the animation process.

Things are now running much faster than before! Within the current region, there are something like 300 monsters operating at once. Their current AI is temporary, so it’s still (intentionally) fairly inefficient. That means we can expect to see performance remain around this level throughout the majority of development. This is more monsters than TQ ever had operating at once, and it’s still buttery smooth to play! One big change is that animations now only play when the room is in focus by the player, which is a big help. I managed to free up a lot of resources from unused testing resources and duplicate nodes that I was using for testing.

I ran into a technically interesting error in which my turn queue system was adding to the stack instead of being freed. It was a little bit tricky to find a working solution because I found the documentation around running async commands in Godot to be a little bit confusing. In the end, though, I got it working so that the game doesn’t crash from a stack overflow.

I’m currently about halfway through adding the custom room shapes to the game. I think it’ll add a lot more to the game if I can get those done for the next version, which is partially why I’m planning a release next week!


Next Week

Like I said, aiming for a new version to come out next week. My dream scenario is to have some chests around the map that the player can pull from. It requires implementing another custom class for the containers and tying them to the existing framework. All-in-all it is a little bit far fetched but that’s my stretch goal.

That’s it for this week! Let me know what you think about the changes to SubscribeStar and the devlog this week. Looking forward to sharing my progress with you all next week!

 

 

The next release will hopefully be next week!