Things have slowed down a bit, I'm looking to ramp them back up shortly. I went in and did some work on scenes. I suppose I haven't talked about this before, there is a scene system that more or less is helpful for things like changing what entities are on which map and things like that. I think it will also be useful for having repeated scenes, and potentially gallery stuff, but that's probably far off for now.

In the last update I created the scene system, as well as significant reworks of... everything including the tile map system and map entities. As such the scene system grew and had to handle more things, in a rather slapdash way.

This was frankly, a pain in the ass, but it worked for the two or three scenes I had. However in reviewing it, this is definitely not how I wanted to handle scenes and scene changing.

I shifted some of the responsibilities that the scene system had to places that were more relevant, and I changed scenes from actively running complicated code, to being something of a carrying container for parameters, that it spits to the relevant places and systems.

What is tricky is that for scenes, they do have to execute custom bits of code. But I've made design changes to how scenes pull from passages, to shift the custom pieces of code to these passages, instead of being in the scene objects themselves. Perhaps that's a little bit technical, but that's more or less what I've been doing, and I'm quite satisfied with it.

I also did some work with how the maps work. I've added map modifications. These are, well, modifications to the base map. This means that for things like making dynamic changes to maps, making temporary changes to maps, or for things like adding in certain quest specific modifications. I no longer need to no longer directly change the map (sort of). Instead there are now specifically named modifications that can be turned off and on, and I no longer need to directly modify how the map is built and rebuild it to make modifications. It also proves to me that the current systems aligns with my ideals of being powerful, and easy to work with so that's nice.

other than that I've gotten back to working on the combat system. I am a bit frustrated because I've been going in and reworking things. As I was adding more actions, one of the functions was more fragile than I was comfortable with and it was clear there were ways to make things clearer and simpler, so I've been reworking some of that. However it is nice because I haven't been dissatisfied with how I've designed the combat system, I'm more or less just cleaning it up and getting the code more streamlined. I still have to add more polish, and deal with other types of actions and things like that. But things are still progressing pretty well.

For one last final thing, I've been trying to get back into writing more. I've had some fun with it! And I might even start releasing it in the future! If that's something anyone is interested in let me know!

Hello again! Things are going pretty smoothly and I've made some good progress. Right now I've been working on implementing maps better, namely how they are initialized and how they are handled between game versions. I'm hopeful that won't take too long. I may also look into cleaning up the quest system a bit, but we'll see how it goes, I know I at least have to fix some bugs there.

So, you might be asking, what about the combat system? Well, it's pretty complicated, and has a lot of moving parts, so I've decided to scrap-- kidding. It's done, mostly. I need to polish it up and It's a open question how much use it'll get used in the next update. But I've moved out of the building phase with it and am now more in the polishing stages. So the actual design work of how it's implemented and works and functions is more or less over with. And I'm feeling pretty happy with it.

Well, that's it. Hopefully I can get back to you soon about making more progress!