shibagani48

Weekly report Jan 1/4, 2025

Added 2025-01-14 11:17:28 +0000 UTC

Happy new year!
Thank you as always for your support.
Let's take a look at this week's progress!

Demo Update

download it from here. The new password is "wXFWNZLhf7Pdhwd".

Reconstructed the Internal System for Menu Operations
Visualized the Device Authentication Status for Player 1 and Player 2
Improved Key Configuration System
Experimentally Enabled Chaining from 5A to 5B
This route has been requested multiple times by Mr. Lucky.
To be honest, I’m not entirely in favor of this change. While it’s fun to continue combos, my concern is that if players can link from 5A to 5C, everyone will only use 5A, limiting the variety of actions.
Currently, many of the players enjoying Helper Versus focus on the artistry of combos, but fundamentally, this is a competitive game. It’s not ideal for the means of strategic play to become overly uniform.
Thus, if there are no gameplay videos or feedback regarding this change by the next demo update, this route will be removed again. Please keep this in mind.

Key Configuration Improvements

Since we abandoned online play last year, local matches will be the primary mode for the time being.
As such, it is essential to ensure that both players can operate the game properly.
While the current key configuration system allows for two-player operation, it’s unstable.
Given the increasing number of bug reports about key configuration issues, I’ve decided to overhaul it.

When I first coded the menu system, I had just learned about class inheritance, so I used it extensively in the implementation.
However, the overuse of inheritance resulted in a mess: I couldn’t tell where anything was written, and unused superclass variables and virtual functions frequently caused errors, ironically making the system less flexible.
As a result, the old code became so cryptic that I found it discouraging even to look at it, let alone make improvements.

The newly created pause menu, on the other hand, is simple and flexible, so I decided to scrap the old system and rewrite everything from scratch.

One of the new features added is a duplicate key swapping process.
When a key is rebound and the newly assigned key is already in use by another action, the old key is automatically reassigned to that action.
While it works correctly in most cases, there are still occasional issues. However, since the problems are not critical and further fixes would delay the submission of the weekly report even more, I hope you’ll forgive me for leaving it as is for now.

There was a bug where rebinding keys from the pause menu caused battle inputs to be executed even though the menu controls should have been active.
This seems to be the same issue reported on Discord before, and I identified that the root cause is the use of actionAssets.Enable.
Calling this function activates all control states, allowing for unintended simultaneous operation of the menu and battle systems.
While fixing this, I also unintentionally managed to enable instantaneous reflection of changes to battle key configurations made through the pause menu.

I couldn’t get around to implementing features like player-side selection or character selection this time. Menu system development always takes far more time than expected…

Event Report

On December 30, I participated in Comic Market 105.

The gacha machines were incredibly popular and were the first items to sell out!
However, the tools for the gacha machines took up a lot of space, and when combined with the books, the booth space became very cramped.
The date for the next event participation is still undecided, but if I do attend, I’ll consider renting space for two booths.