Hello and welcome back! I apologize about the ~1 cycle hiatus. I thought that I mentioned it in my last devlog, but when I looked back it was nowhere to be seen. I moved house again – I was renting out a really cheap apartment with a fixed term lease to save some money and the lease expired in June, so I had to pack up and head out. Sorry about that! Amidst all the stress, it totally slipped my mind.

Anyways, onto the important things: what’s happened with TfQuest since the last update?
 
 This session, I:

- Branched out another class of objects specifically as containers to reduce load times and complexity

- Added an entirely new inheritance system to the loading scripts (more information on that in a bit, and even more information in the Technical Digest)

-  Started on ✨Content✨ finally

-  Finalized a decent amount of the framework

For those who aren’t familiar, an inheritance system essentially means that an object in the game can have a parent. For instance, a shirt might be the parent of a red shirt, where the thing that changes between them is small enough that it’s worth using shirt as a template to make changes from.
 
 TfQuest has a multiple inheritance system meaning that an object can have multiple parents. For instance, a bra + swimwear would give you a bikini – the form factor of the bra combined with the swimming speed that swimwear gives you. It’s a powerful tool for being able to create new objects.

What does the new inheritance system do, you ask? Well, most inheritance systems (like in TQ) are used to load in objects. This one is tracked throughout the whole game. Each item has a breakdown of its components. Let me few examples:

[Monster, Human, Guard, Spear] -> Human Guard

*POOF!* A transformation potion goes off.

[Monster, Human, Magical Girl, Spear] -> Magical Girl

[Monster, Player, Mage] -> Human Wizard

A wizard casts a curse on you! You’re shrinking!

[Item, Player, Amulet] -> Magical Amulet 

[Item, Deployable Room, Safehouse, Forest] -> Deployable Safehouse

You use the safehouse! A cozy-looking tent appears in front of you.

[Room, Safehouse, Forest]

Everything updates automatically. All of the variables get recalculated for the magical girl based off of the new parents: Human, Magical Girl, Spear. This is a pretty tame example, but I hope it illustrates my point. This is a huge backbone and the basis for almost all of the interconnectivity between systems. I’ll have more complex showcases of the exact functionality in the Technical Digest, but this should illustrate my point. We’re talking quick (or slow), efficient, modular transformations between any two states. Yes, there are options for over time effects as well.

It's a big difference! A lot of thought went into the best way to accommodate all of the needs of TFQuest, and this was the best way to do it. As always there’s more information in the Technical Digest below, and thank you so much for reading! If you have any questions, please let me know! I’ll be around on Discord this evening (AST) to chat about any of the details.

Hello and welcome back to another dev update!

Both my partner and I got very sick since my last update, but I was feeling better this week and I still got a decent amount of changes made! Most of the changes are rather technical, but I'll sum them up the best I can:

The two big things for this week:
> Adding a weighted random spawning system for monsters using a 'regional affinity score'
> Parsing and improving TQ's item distribution code for placing items in chests

New subactions, including:
> change stat, which will be the backbone of a lot of actions
> new targeting subaction for targeting other monsters

Bug Fixes:
> fixed an error causing the AI controller to crash when unable to find an action
> fixed a bug where the improper face would sometimes load onto the Danaume model

If you'd like to read more about any of the changes this week, I'll add on a technical digest in the post right below this! It'll include all of my thoughts on how the new systems work, the causes of all of the bugs, and how I fixed them!

In terms of what's coming in the future, I'm not quite ready to put anything out to the general public, and just a slight bit closer than that to being ready for another nightly. A lot of systems are at a very comfortable halfway point, though! I think I'm intending to add in the item distribution code, fix up the player's action system, and then make another release.

That's all for this week! Thanks so much for your continued support - especially to those people who are supporting me financially. I'm sticking to my guns on keeping everything reasonable free, and I'm very happy to say that I've only lost the support of a few people since that decision. For as long as I am able, I'm very happy to make things openly accessible to everyone!

Have a good weekend everyone, and I'll see you around!

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!