october 2021: catch-up
november 1, 2021
#diary
summary
Mostly catching up to deadlines, giving extra play-time to kitty, and making new friends in Pixelmon. Also, sewing a few more garments is a stronger priority than gamedev lately.
Gamedev-wise, I'm doing an integration test and playtesting. It's a real struggle to make the controls do everything I expect them to. Game companies make contextual controls look easy. Maybe I'll find time to implement a full event, start to finish, complete with dialog and a multiphase boss fight and rewards once the integration test is done. ;-; I think I have all the programming-centric systems in place to do that. Art, animation, and sound will be its own wave.
Anyway, I can't believe I've been titling my monthly diary entries as "2020" all year. Finally fixed that. Also...why is the whole website on such an old version? Have I not been pushing anything to live? I thought I had a word frequency cloud and a working diary page navigation pane. Weird.
sunday, october 17
- It was below 80°F/27°C for the first time all year! My favorite season has finally arrived. Time for my fall coat, warm spicy perfume, and apple butter toast with chai! The heat has been miserable, even indoors, so it will not be missed.
- Last time I started Blessfrey, it didn't run at all. I was really motivated to add an events and a cutscene, but I debugged the game instead. Today it works okay, but I realize you can no longer talk to Chloe. That makes a lot of sense, since I designed the move-do-something loop to only worry about combat. I should get confident about the controls for interact, activate, attack, talk, pick up, move to target, don't move to target, and probably lots of other potentially overlapping controls. So...I need to make more diagrams.
saturday, october 29
- I wish I documented more. I want to document the current movement system better (even though it feels like I do that all the time) to better explain dots, nexts, waypoints, etc, and how they are derived. I also want a solid reference for what groups I'm using and what layers everything exists on/is affected by. Time to start some new documents.
- The player doesn't move again. She was never advancing to the next dot. (Obviously the first dot in pathfinding will be the player's starting position.) I made the AI's method for getting the next dot skip anything at the player's global position, which works fine for now. I bet I'll run into more problems the next time she tries to pathfind around a curve, though.
- I want to add dialog back in as part of an integration test, so the player needs to be able to interact with Chloe again. Of course, she mysteriously isn't tracked as interactable. Last time I remade the characters, I didn't get the layers/masks right, so I take the chance to make entities more consistent and improve my documentation. After that, I could start some dialog at interact, but Jiskan-16 is still bizarrely invisible in-engine and in-game at size 16. (How did that suddenly happen?? It's made for size 16!) After I match dialog's theme to the main menu theme (identical rn anyway), the text appears properly in the window once again. I've got dialog back.
- I added an obstacle wall to break up the square testing room. Against my predictions, she can pathfind around corners. Whew.
- Next, I want the player to use a skill on Chloe. The skills in the player's skillbar are generic'd and all the text doesn't display. (Stupid Jiskan.)
saturday, october 31 - halloween
- Usually I prepare a costume or at least put out my skeleton doormat, but Halloween almost completely slipped my mind this year. At least I got candy. I've always lived in apartments, so I've never had trick-or-treaters before. I thought they all did Trunk or Treat or some school function instead these days, but we actually did have a few visitors. :)
Last updated january 25, 2022