Progress update!

Hey y'all, progress update time. Changes span across a few categories:

I got the big UI architecture idea working! That took the bulk of my dev time. I'll be using this UI code to build everything now. Right now there's not much to see besides a single unstyled omni-testing-button (which I am very proud of!) that tests all aspects of the UI code tree at once. You'll probably see the new UI in all future screenshots. Behold the nerd diagrams I madly scrawled to be able to understand it:

Built better camera zoom smoothing and motion interactions. Being able to move the view around without thinking about it is SUCH a bigger deal than I thought! Courtesy of my partner, who has been championing designing a better baseline player experience.

Core engine

Fixed eyebrows sometimes being the wrong color... by adding a whole new feature for rendering small, rapidly changing pieces of characters. An unexpected detour and significant engine upgrade.

Backgrounds are smarter and better tile-able to prepare for interactive customizable environments.

Did lots of testing for how I wanna store the game's files. It's part of the larger push toward the character creation tools. Plus, this'll be needed for save files and custom scenarios.

Rewrote the game loading code! I needed to in order to make better testing environments for the stuff mentioned above. And since we're gonna use this engine in multiple games, it helps to make the engine itself customizable. Now I can easily fiddle with basic ideas that aren't fully ready, like this lil node/wiring... thingy:

Fluids and shaders

I'm learning to code fluid and effects rendering now (glsl shaders~). I have no idea when this specific journey will pay off, so I'm spending personal time and not dev time on it. I've tried to give myself quick crash courses in order to learn this kind of programming in the past, but it's too arcane compared to what I normally do. If I ever want to make fluids look the way I want them to in my games, I'll have to sit down and learn to write shaders the slow and steady way. Wish me luck y'all.

My thoughts

Gosh, I'm thankful the UI code is fully operational now. It's been the single most difficult aspect of any game project for me. The inside of this game engine is a constantly shifting set of modular pieces. The outside shell is the opposite- a rigid structure. I needed the UI to work with both halves of that situation. 

What I've built now has got two big features: 

I underestimated the challenges of making something that fulfills these two requirements. But here we are, some months (and concerned DMs) later. And yep, this works.

The reason for the second requirement is that it gives me the ability to build my own dev tools in-engine. And as a result, our tools can become the player's toys. Right now I'm using the freshly-working UI code to build the facial expression designer we're using for development. This'll become part of the player's character customizer. Stuff like full customizers, detailed readouts, and complex controls are best displayed over top the game like a web page. 

Meanwhile, we can also do in-the-world UI. This is what you'd mostly use when just playing, since it's better at visualization, and it can visually interact with the world or characters' bodies. 

The player's baseline experience is drastically affected by UI. I mostly neglected this entire branch of game design when I was doing solo dev. I didn't have much interest or knowledge about the topic, other than a general desire to make my games "feel good". It's a good thing for all of us that I now have a team member who has passion and knowledge about UI and user experience. With our powers combined (me as developer/artist, them as designer/advisor), I think we can make effective use of these new UI features.

Next up

My partner has had to hold me back and convince me to write this post. I'm eager to race forward after finally getting this far. 

We're now -- FINALLY -- in the feature wrap-up phase. Meaning I'm not intending to write any new features or mechanics until release. All of my efforts are now going into filling out and USING the game engine's current features. 

It's totally understandable to not wanna support right now. My method of building this engine (slow and steady, addressing long-term needs first) ended up guaranteeing a long development cycle without playable builds. I didn't predict the lack of playable builds part. But I think this will produce the best games in the end, so I'm pressing forward. The fact that there are SO MANY of you who are still so driven to support this project for SO LONG is inspiring as hell. I'm just blown away. 

I think it's worth continuing with the same approach: do it right, do it thoroughly, don't dress it up before it's ready, but still do try my best not to keep everyone waiting. Since regular progress posts eat up quite a bit of dev time, I'm gonna continue to focus on coding more, and only posting when there's noteworthy progress to talk about, or something to show off. 

Thanks for keeping this going, y'all.

<3