blessfrey-bottle/src/diary/entries/210201

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<h1>january 2021: new year</h1>
february 1, 2021<br>
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<h2>week 1, january 1-2 </h2><br>
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<h3>friday, january 1 - New Year's</h3>
<ul>
<li>2020 is over. Things probably won't be back to normal soon, so let's make the most of 2021!☆ </li>
</ul>
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<h2>week 2, january 3-9 </h2><br>
#character #refactor<br>
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<h3>sunday, january 3 </h3>
<ul>
<li>Trendmood leaked <a href="https://www.temptalia.com/colourpop-x-animal-crossing-collection-swatches/">Colourpop×Animal Crossing</a>. That's one of my favorite IPs and one for which a makeup collaboration was unimaginable, and I don't care. I don't know if it's the market oversaturation or I'm just salty about New Horizons simplifying the villagers. Animal Crossing collabs are a dime a dozen now. (<a href="https://blackmilkclothing.com/collections/blackmilk-x-animal-crossing-new-horizons?utm_campaign=136203_animalcrossing-release-13oct20">BlackMilkClothing×AC</a> is still up after months, even after discounts, ouch.) Feels like Nintendo's devolving back into the toy business sometimes. </li>
<li>Imagine if more videogame makeup leads to Urban Decay×SMT somehow, though...so grungy and neon! </li>
<li>The character script is completely broken up - methods have been moved closer to where they are used. So, methods for calculating xp + level are moved from character to an attribute subscript. </li>
<li>Replaced constants to subnode paths with getters. Some _ready methods need to call methods off child nodes, but those nodes will still be null. I don't understand why very well. ;-; Using a getter, plus being more conscientious about what order to call things within _ready, fixed it. I should probably document it in an article because that's been a perplexing problem since I first starting working on character movement. </li>
</ul>
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<h3>monday, january 4 </h3>
<ul>
<li>Holiday break over. </li>
<li>I visit blessfrey.me to see it's down...oops. It's been down since my last update, so a few days. I never turned the Bottle script back on...OTL sorry </li>
<li>So many bug fixes. This is one of the most dramatic refactors ever, since character was one of my first scripts (a product of inexperience) and I never really improved it, just piled on more code. <li>
<li>The Player and default NPCs are passing. Just got to change a few lines on the specific NPCs like the slimes, and the game should run again, maybe even as intended...but I'm too tired. I'm closing in on the goal of revamping the passive health regen/degen, though. </li>
</ul>
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<h3>wednesday, january 6 </h3>
<ul>
<li>I watched streams of the March for Trump against the Capitol. I collected some riot photos into a <a href="https://www.blessfrey.me/diary/entries/extra/stop-the-steal">gallery</a>. </li>
<li>I organized files better. (Great idea when the game hasn't been able to start since the character restructure.) Fixed a hundred dependencies, file path references. </li>
</ul>
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<h3>thursday, january 7 </h3>
<ul>
<li>I didn't fix the dependencies for the font resources correctly yesterday, but the text is showing up properly in the game now. </li>
<li>Now that the Player (minus its UI) internally uses its new + improved setters, getters, and verbs, I start updating the rest of the objects' character references. </li>
<li>Things that have been mysteriously broken forever are getting fixed left + right. This refactor is already paying off. </li>
</ul>
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<h3>friday, january 8 </h3>
<ul>
<li>I applied the same style from the character refactor to the AI and UI, but not a lot needs to change. It's really just the early scripts that need to be reworked. I'm improving. </li>
<li>There are still systems that need to be updated. I fixed character movement and highlighting targets. </li>
<li>UserControl (Player's AI script) was never really updated to use the new state machines. Now it is coded more similarly to other character AI scripts. </li>
</ul>
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<h3>saturday, january 9 </h3>
<ul>
<li>Continue to update scripts to use the new + improved character refactor, mostly AI and Main Menu scripts. </li>
</ul>
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<h2>week 3, january 10-16 </h2><br>
#character #refactor<br>
<h3>monday, january 10 </h3>
<ul>
<li>More of the same but this time with skills, skill usage AI, and skillbar UI. </li>
</ul>
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<h3>tuesday, january 11 </h3>
<ul>
<li>Finished reading Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy (after 6-or-something years of slow reading). </li>
<li>Update click-to-move, since pathfinding had a bug where the character would keep moving forward even after reaching her destination. </li>
<li>More skill updates, mostly with tooltips + activation bars. For the first time, the activation bar disappears after the skill is activated. </li>
</ul>
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<h3>thursday, january 14 </h3>
<ul>
<li>Moving on to items. I begin making sure items use verbs called off the main item object, instead of unrelated nodes calling specific methods off of sub-nodes of the item. </li>
<li>Also, begin refactoring containers. I didn't plan beforehand very well, and they don't have very good separation of concerns. So of course they have some weird, unexpected behavior. It would be amazing if the weirdness could just melt away after refactoring, like what the character refactor accomplished. </li>
<li>Also begin refactoring related systems, including the inventory and item context menu. </li>
</ul>
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<h3>friday, january 15 </h3>
<ul>
<li>Finished reading William Bradshaw's The Goddess Of Atvatabar. Not sure what to read next. I wanted to find George Sand's Laura: A Journey into the Crystal, but it's too obscure and poorly reviewed and untranslated (which is ridiculous for such a prominent writer). Probably too hard to find...but that makes me want to read it even more. </li>
</ul>
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<h3>saturday, january 16 </h3>
<ul>
<li>Refactored containers, both programmatic + UI. </li>
<li>Resolved all the new errors relating to the character refactor by making sure all the expected signals + methods existed and were connected to the proper objects. </li>
</ul>
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<h2>week 4, january 17-23 </h2><br>
#fogofwar #refactor #writing<br>
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<h3>sunday, january 17 </h3>
<ul>
<li>Lots of fixes, both new issues related to the refactor and old "known issues" </li>
<li>Fixed the energy + healthbar displays </li>
<li>Fixed the context menu </li>
<li>An embarrassing one. The inventory has always filled slot 1 then slot 2 then 1, 1, 1...and I had no idea why when it was really simple. I was using a <a href="https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/classes/class_vsplitcontainer.html">VSplitContainer</a> instead of a <a href="https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/classes/class_vboxcontainer.html">VBoxContainer</a>. Duh. </li>
</ul>
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<h3>monday, january 18 </h3>
<ul>
<li>Epik High's phone premier of <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FCsLikmxhV0">Rosario</a>, featuring CL and Zico, two favorite artists who I never imagined together. Amazing! I love that they're collabing with both old school KPOP (B.I!) and newer artists like Heize. </li>
<li>Spent too much time drawing a fog of war mask in GraphicsGale. </li>
</ul>
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<h3>tuesday, january 19 </h3>
<ul>
<li>Started reading Ingersoll Lockwood's Baron Trump's Marvellous Underground Journey - it was one of the <a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/browse/scores/top#books-last1">most-downloaded Gutenberg books</a> yesterday. I remember when the internet discovered it and tried to find similarities between the characters and the Trump family. It's another inner earth tale, though, so it matches my other books. </li>
<li>Finish writing one of my favorite events with a favorite character. :) </li>
</ul>
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<h3>wednesday, january 20 - President Biden's Inauguration</h3>
<li>Wrote branching dialog in Dia. I need to get used to the hotkeys, so I can write faster. I should write more. Before the pandemic, I wrote at least a vignette every day, even if there were lots of duds. </li>
</ul>
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<h3>thursday, january 21 </h3>
<ul>
<li>I've been procrastinating working on Fog of War, but I'm really going to make progress today. I found the 2D Lights as Mask demo to begin learning how Light2Ds and masks work. I applied the concepts to blessfrey in their most rigid hard-coded form, but at least the map isn't completely visible anymore. </li>
<li>I feel like fog of war is a feature that feels really polished, even if it's implemented simply and doesn't add much content. I'm really craving a polish feature right now. I also want to iterate over the art again and go more top-down. </li>
<li>Fog of War means a lot of things. I want something like Planescape: Torment (been playing it lately), where the map starts out black and nothing can be interacted with, the immediate area around the player is lit and fully interactive, and the discovered but out-of-range areas are dimly lit and interactive. The fog of war is usually circular but follows the party's line-of-sight, so sharp corners obstruct the view. </li> 
</ul>
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<h3>friday, january 22 </h3>
<ul>
<li>Start reading the Land of the Lustrous manga. </li>
<li>Fiddle around with masks again. I attached the solid light to the player and made masks with various opacities to scatter around the environment. The immediate area is lit, and the rest is dimly lit. Planescape: Torment uses a pixel grid fill for gradients, since it's from 1999. It looks okay in that game, but mine gets that mesmerizing rainbow effect when you move around. (maybe it's called a diffraction pattern?) </li> 
</ul>
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<h3>saturday, january 23 </h3>
<ul>
<li>I have a version working with using Area2D that show a child Light2D upon collision with the player. It'd be easy to save and load that, since it's just a binary. </li> 
<li>I wanted to repackage my jam gam jam and put it on my website, but I should do that with blessfrey, too. It's a really boring time to want blessfrey up, since I removed all allies, enemies, and currently only have one zone, but it's good to ship periodically. I guess I'll comb through again and either quickly complete or obviously rope off incomplete features. </li>
<li>Apparently, you don't just open HTML files anymore. You have to run <a href="https://godotengine.org/qa/69170/how-to-export-my-project-to-html5-without-errors">python -m http.server</a> in the command line first. <li>
</ul>
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<h2>week 5, january 24-30 </h2><br>
#<br>
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<h3>sunday, january 24 </h3>
<ul>
<li>It's been brought to my attention there's a doll movie "MyScene Goes Hollywood" where the girls have to impress Harvey Weinstein. </li>
<li>Adjust resolution. </li> 
</ul>
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<h3>tuesday, january 26 </h3>
<ul>
<li>The journalist lied. Harvey Weinstein isn't in the plot. Still such a crazy regrettable choice of celebrity for a children's movie. </li>
<li>I downloaded Chrome to test my website.  </li> 
<li>Update website, tweak website code. </li>
</ul>
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<h3>wednesday, january 27 </h3>
<ul>
<li>Worked on character development. Listed out my key characters and bulleted out their backstory, shortcomings/bad experiences, how that affects their relationships with other characters, why that involves them in the story, the changing point in their arc, and where their story can end. I still need to do this exercise for Chloe, the pastor, and Angel's dad. </li>
<li>The main character's still just kind of there, being dragged around in the story. It's difficult for me to add character motivation for a playable character. For the player, that's going to be coming from the game's hook and pacing and personal reaction to the game world. Some people say it's harder to get involved with a cardboard main character, but I don't know. I was absolutely hooked on Lost Eden's story, even if Prince Adam is so empty that clicking on him just takes you to the options menu void. At the same time, a quirky main character adds a lot to the fun for me. I really enjoyed picking all the clueless, amnesiac options for Ren in Persona 5 and making him low-key gay for Akechi. I was also bemused by Sophie's belligerent atheism and her in her Atelier game. I just...never wrote a game story before and don't know how to do it. ;-; </li>
<li>Initially, I had a big cast of characters who didn't have a lot going on with them, but it would be a pain to make resources for all of them. Combining and cutting helped make the characters more interesting. Still, they didn't really have arcs. I also didn't really have the first antagonist as more than a shallow concept until this month. I still don't know her name and appearance...if I even want her to be a girl. </li>
<li>I also worked on plot. I only have a grasp on the plot up to the mid-point and don't know where to finish it. Watching Youtube writing channels helped flesh out what I already had, at least. Since it's a game, it's more fun to have lots of paths and let the player their own place among the different factions. That's ridiculous for scope, though. I hope when I add story missions, it'll be more obvious where to go? But it would sure be easier to edit the story before all the coding and assets are made. ;-; </li>
<li>Maybe I'm too worried about the story. Mechanics are most important at the end of the day. Even among people who play games for the story, they apparently retain very poor comprehension of the story. Instead, their attention is fully on the characters. (citation - some GDC talk) So, so long as I have cute characters, it's all good, right? </li>
<li><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v-I9N5LsvPM">How to Plot Your Novel FAST | Writing Advice - Ellen Brock</a> was the best video I watched for understanding the process an editor uses to build a prompt into a plot. </li>
<li><a href="https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1020031/Using-User-Research-to-Improve">Deborah Hendersen's Microsoft user research study</a> talks about how players don't remember anything but the characters. I just found some slides. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4mgK2hL33Vw">Jeremy Bernstein's Creating Strong Video Game Characters</a> mentions it, but there was another that went into more detail...but I haven't watched GDC talks in forever so don't remember. </li> 
</ul>
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<h3>thursday, january 28 </h3>
<ul>
<li>The language-change button does something for the first time. Now, choosing English or 日本語 will automatically update all the text. I put all text-bearing objects in a group and update their text from the UI singleton. It's useful if I want more language options, but it's also useful to ensure each text is in my spreadsheet instead of embedded directly in the engine. It's also an opportunity to make my text-displaying code more consistent across my game. </li>
<li>Fixing serialization. </li>
</ul>
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<h3>friday, january 29 </h3>
<ul>
<li>finished up a personal page for my FlightRising badges so imgur and tinypic will stop deleting my precious things. </li>
<li>wrote some bash scripts for updating my website. No more scp and rm and tmux. It's less of a hassle to move small changes to live now. When I want to execute things on my server, I never remember to adjust the permissions... </li>
<li>Serialization works again after the character refactor. </li>
<li>I finally tried using <a href="https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/classes/class_theme.html">themes</a> instead of customizing a font for each individual object. Now I can just change the theme instead of each individual object. </li>
<li>Fixed a highlight problem. Used to, when you hovered from one object to an immediate neighbor, you would change targets before you could unhighlight the old target. Now all highlightable targets belong to a group. When you hover over a new target, all members of that group unhighlight. </li>
<li>basically lots of removing the hard-coding </li>
</ul>
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<h3>saturday, january 30 </h3>
<ul>
<li>Refactored skills + updated the skillmaker python script. </li>
<li>Fixed UI bugs as I found them. </li>
<li>Made a system for meaningful object ids. They're in hexadecimal so they can be succinct + flexible at the same time. </li>
</ul>
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<h2>week 6, january 31 </h2><br>
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<h3>sunday, january 31 </h3>
<ul>
<li>I left a pen in the laundry and ruined a nice sweater TT_TT </li>
<li>Fixed more bugs, a little more refactoring for skills + character, and now it's time to add my slime character back into the game. During this refactor, all characters were removed, so the PC's getting lonely.  </li>
<li>My refactor was biased towards there only being a PC, so I move some of the player-only logic out of the base character object. </li>
</ul>
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last updated 3/2/2021<br>