This Week in the Forest! #54

YO FOLKS~! Hope y'alls holidays went well for those in the states!

Here's what we've been up to for the week, starting with A Word from Vixel!

11/29 weekly report:

Heya floofs! Had a couple days off for Thanksgiving chaos with extended family gathering at the house. If you celebrate that holiday, I hope yours was awesome! :}}

Been working in the Unity upgrade project on scripts that read our new database for dialogue and rules, fire event triggers to make something happen, and track player progress through the game. I brought over all related scripts we've been using since Act 2, and am editing each one to purge unnecessary code and reduce dependencies on other scripts. There are currently 41 custom scripts involved. Next I'll transfer scripts for the save system, notebook, and quest manager and update those to work with the new and improved "data layer."

Also imported all the remaining art assets from the Act 2 project! I'm still reorganizing files & creating Sprite Atlases to group related textures. Sprite Atlases are a *super* important optimization tool we'll be using a lot in the upgrade project. As an example of how much they come in handy: In Act 2, the game would render every inventory item as its own standalone texture, which meant the game was calling the graphics card over and over just to show a full inventory page. With a Sprite Atlas, Unity can send one large texture to the graphics card once, and efficiently show parts of it at a time. Having art in Sprite Atlases unlocks additional controls for texture compression in Web GL, as well. These improvements will go a long way to making the game run faster and smoother in any of our builds.

Here's an example with all the character portraits packed into one Sprite Atlas. The checkerboard is ugly but it's how Unity represents transparent pixels. Unity can automatically pack and rotate each portrait to make highly efficient use of space!

More next week! ^w^

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xD those upside down sprites!

On my end I've been cleaning up some of our act 3 dialogue scripts. TURNS OUT, during my roughing out of the act 3 script, I had a few sections with like "Character convinces other character here" - and I didn't actually write it out lmao.

So I'm polishing up that stuff, while going through and making new portraits for it all. Also new assets! For example, the backroom of the shop.

Lights, Camera, Action!

Looks like these critters are gonna put that camera to use ;O! 

I've still been taking it a bit easy with the eyeballs. They're making great progress, but visions not perfect, so looking at screens/focusing for too long gets them all dry and irritated. I need glasses to fix the astigmatism, but the doc says I gotta wait until they've fully healed, probably another couple weeks. 

So I'll be doing what I can till then. But still taking it easy. It's the holidays anyways, so I suppose if there was a time to be slackin' a bit, this would be it xvx. Just annoying, I'd rather be getting some shiz done! Can't wait for those glasses!

Anywho that's it for us this week!

See ya guys next time :>!