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!

Hello there, everyone! Welcome to the first 'minor' public devlog!

In regards to changes to monetization, I have decided to make a couple changes.

Firstly, all devlogs will be public starting this week. I will open up previous versions starting soon.

Secondly, all releases that I want feedback on will be public! I really hope this helps to grow the community around development and get more people interested. 

Finally, releases with systems updates or changes to the codebase that are less impactful will be taking place of the current 'nightly' builds. These will be available to everyone who chooses to financially support me month-to-month, as a way of showing my appreciation for the support. I'm not sure what the split of releases will look like yet, but I'm not going to stress about the specifics yet. The release schedule will come to be what it is in time!

Obviously, the two changes above will hit my income a bit, but I firmly believe that it's worth it. I'll also be adding in a $2 tier that gets the same access to every build as the other tiers, just as an in-between for people who might want to support at a different amount. To anyone who chooses to continue supporting in any way, including as a member of the community, I really really appreciate it!

I'm hoping to have these changes to my SubscribeStar page done for some time next week.

Anyways, let's get back to the important things!

This week brings us two new systems changes: Firstly, the player no longer exists. Now, turns are taken entirely by the 'monsters' of the game. The player just happens to be one! That means that tying in all of the things we talked about a week ago should be options for the future.

Secondly, a new animation controller for monsters! Once I got the player removed and everything working, I noticed that the camera was panning away before the monsters finished moving. That meant that it was time to implement the last part of the monsters that I had planned, which is an animation controller. Essentially, it works to handle all of the animations for monsters in one place - the time they take, when to switch animations, and what to do at the end of those animations. Part of the animation controller is tied directly into the turn controller process and runs the on-screen animations after the processing for a turn has happened. Then, it can report back to the turn controller when any given monster has finished animating and is ready to end its turn.

One of the neat things about implementing all of these systems is that even if a combat system is completely out of the question for TfQuest and doesn't end up being a good fit, this animation framework and the underlying grid system will still be able to run on-screen as a visual aid that will help increase the depth of the game. 

Next week, I'm going to create a player.json file that will load the actual player. I'm going to do some things like add a 'starting room' field and some other things that are necessary for the player to properly load in. Then, I'd like to start adding ways for the player to interact with the world. 


I'm also going to start adding customizable room shapes as an option! This will hopefully add more personality to the game. I'm not sure if I'm going to add any custom room shapes right away, but I do want to get the internal code done to support them.

In a few weeks, I'm hoping to add the framework to start adding chests to tie items back into the game again. To be clear, all the framework is still there already, but I need to give the items another way to show up!

That's all for this week. I hope the monetization changes sound amicable to everyone! Let me know what you think of the project so far, and I look forward to next week when I get to write another one of these!

See you all around~