# december 2020: holiday season☆

january 1, 2021
I didn't keep a diary very well this month;; This is mostly pieced together from my git history. I did play Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver and Planescape: Torment a lot, though.

## week 1, december 1-5

#python

- worked on Skillmaker, a Python script that can use JSON data to generate skill scenes + scripts for Godot Engine
- Skillmaker can generate descriptions that fit a standard format. It's not used in-game, though, it's just plopped in a comment on the skill script. In the future, I want Skillmaker to generate a CSV file, so Godot can read in the generated description instead of the text being hard-coded inside the engine. That way, editing + translating will be easier.
- those descriptions use variables. In the future, those variables will allow skill values to grow with the character's stats.

## week 2, december 6-12

#python

- updated Skillmaker's readme, since expected input has changed a lot
- after 8 years, Cyberpunk 2077 finally came out. I can't do $59.99 + 100GB, so the closest I can do is watch Batman Beyond instead.
- lots of FlightRising. my flight competed against Light for Dominance. They won, but they had to raffle off a priceless Kickstarter item during the final hours to flip us off the top. I can't imagine how costly that win was for Light, and even then, it wasn't definitive...I wish I tried harder.

## week 3, december 13-19

- probably nothing really very productive
- finished reading Voltaire's Candide. Not sure if it was the best year for a literary attack against the optimistic view that everything turns out for the best, but it's a fun + easy read nonetheless.
- started reading William Bradshaw's The Goddess of Atvatabar, a Utopian hollow Earth novel. If inner earth is interesting, I attached a list to a dragon...credits go to all the article writers I didn't credit

## week 4, december 20-26

#python #skills #statuseffects

- Merry Christmas!!
- (keywords are the smallest component of a skill - reusable segments of code for producing a skill effect)
- added summon + bleeding keywords
- added Skillmaker support for generating skills that use those keywords
- maintain this website a little
- found a Linux alternative for OneNote that I finally like - CherryTree. I use it to store research and develop ideas for blessfrey :)

## week 5, december 27-31

#dia #events #refactoring #story

- refactoring the character script. I want to flesh out passive health regeneration/degeneration, so I can have more control with how Bleeding, Burning, and similar keywords will work. But the character script, one of my earliest, was almost 1000 lines, and just looking at it made my brain turn off. I broke it into smaller scripts as a node tree, and now it's 100 lines of code. So clean.
- I finally found a diagram editor I like - Dia :) It's in Mint's package manager, too.
- it's nice for planning branching the flow of events and branching dialog. I wrote a few events with it and made an outline for the game.
- I keep the events in my GDD repository now. I used to keep these all over the place, in paper + text documents. (Why didn't I do this earlier?)