Dev Diary #9

Hey guys,

First of all, thank you everyone who has backed us before and continues to back us on Patreon. The reported figure on Patreon just tipped over $1,000, and every cent of that is helping us massively. Thank you, all of you <3

We've been working hard to earn that money, too. The inventory system nears its prototype completion. We now have an interface which you can open and close either in the map view or the battle view, browse your stuff, and equip or unequip gear. This is all tied to our game data, so while it looks just like you're turning buttons on and off,  in the back end of the code it's now doing all the right things.

Next we need to adjust some numbers to better include equipped gear in our combat damage model, and expand the inventory view to include other properties such as total encumberment, gold value of items, weapon/armour moves, and so on. Overall a relatively smaller task than creating an inventory and an interface for it.

Meanwhile, I've been continuing to explore options for scene and dialogue creation. Now that we know Twine is an option, I've been shopping around for others just on the off chance there's something out there that will give me the tools to be able to write CS' content and use my own Parser/Director design, or at least part of it.

We have found some promising tools that may actually allow this. I'll update you guys more on that once Crimson and I have had a chance to dig in and see for sure.

I also actually made some stuff inside Unity! All on my own, I did. The action button grid is proving more and more clumsy to deal with as we look forward, so I've been putting together an alternative for scene and dialogue navigation. There's really no reason to have a chunk of the screen devoted to inactive buttons when that space could be used for presenting active options better.

Next I want to work on the action buttons during battle, as this needs to have set buttons for selecting choices for fighting, but be able to present special options in the case of scripted battles, such as bosses and other unique fights. Plus going from left to right clicking your attack and then continue could be smoothed out a lot just with some better button positioning.

Until next time!