#general dev

[chattercap]

Announcement: An Experiment

In light of new announcements from Unity, I decided to do a little something. I made a post about it on my Patreon, if you're interested in reading!

Announcement: New Game Engine Experiment | Patreon

Official Post from Chattercap

[chattercap]

November 2023 Development Update

Hello there, happy November! Gosh, it seems like the month flew by! Where does the time go?

I was a bit sick and had quite a bit of stuff going on IRL this month, but I've been making slow and steady progress!

The basic migration from Unity to Godot is almost complete! There are still a few things that I need to think about adding (content warning popups and interactive tutorials, for instance) as well as new features that need implementation (unlockable CG and ending galleries), but overall things have gone smoothly. 

I coded the GUI for the Archives/Help, Settings, and Gallery pages. I also programmed around half of the settings, including the fullscreen toggle, dark mode toggle, and font options. I also coded in most of the basic sprite, CG, and background management, with some "polish" features, such as fading transitions and instantaneous animation on rollback. On the less interesting side, I did a number of bugfixes, including an error where bold/italic dialogues weren't displaying properly and some adjustment of Open Dyslexic so that the line spacing is more similar to the other dialogues (to avoid text overflowing from the screen when you swap to that mode). 

In terms of art, I animated the main sprites for TDW and worked on the storyboard/rendering for the CGs. I'm about halfway done with the art overall. In the past I've mainly done static mouths since animating "mouth opening" can be a little tricky, but I experimented with it this month, and now quite a few of the TDW sprites have mouths that open/close/animate smoothly between different mouth shapes! 

PLANS FOR THIS MONTH

Since the basic coding is largely done (talk about a pretty major detour that I didn't expect to take), I'll be diving headlong into TDW development for now. My goals for November are to finish and revise TDW's script and get the art around 75-80% done before moving on to GUI! 

Thank you to everyone who's keeping up with development! If you want to hear from me more often, I' post most of my major announcements on Tumblr and I'm also fairly active on Twitter/X. I also post almost daily on my Patreon with sketches, writing snippets, sneak peeks, high resolution art, and weekly devlogs.

[sensualcoder-dev]

Finally have been making more progress with the libtcod tutorials. The last time I worked through the older C++ tutorials I got a little stuck at tutorial 6, and figured I needed to do some more reading on architecture concepts. Now, I have gotten through #7 and am on my way into #8.

This time, I am working off of the Python tutorials that HexDecimal made a couple years ago though, which are better broken out in general so it's a bit easier to work through and convert to C++. Though there are still some architecture and best practices work to be done for modern C++ and general software engineering. I started reading the Gang of Four software engineering book recently, so I did a pass through of the code so far to check through the code architecture to see if there was anything that could be improved, and it felt good to put some of the theory I've read into practice.

At some point I'll still have to write up the actual tutorial part of it so others can actually follow along, but I'm overall a lot happier with how it's all turned out so far!