This is the forth dev log and the last one of this length in some time. During the next months I'll be working on my thesis a lot and that means less time working on the game. If everything goes according to plan I should be working 15 hours a week on this instead of the current 35 hours.

Without further ado, here is this week's dev log:

Monday

Programming Department

• Fixed a bug that made the battle rewards appear displaced in fullscreen mode
• Reimplemented overworld dialogs as a finite state machine
  • As a consecuence an unexpected feature was added that now permits dialogs with many types of messages (here's an example with a dialog with avatar messages and plain messages)

• Registered audio sources of the game in categories so they can be affected by audio configuration
  • This means now audio configurations actually work
• Created a method to process sprites with many animations easier and faster

Writing Department

• Added portrait to a character in story manager tool

Art Department

• Made a portrait for a different character to add to the story manager

Game Design Department

• Analized existing battle app and made three decisions
  • Make icons for every ability so they are more memorable
  • Change ability visualizer from ability's execution to ability's choosening
  • Show all abilities that are left when choosing but indicate which ones can't be used
  • Add small icons indicating the pieces of each abilty's to make it easier to understand which one is compatible with which on
• Designed form of application for cutscenes with the overworld view

Other

• Created twitter account for game dev stuff @SmolFrogGames
• Posted some dialogs there

Tuesday

Today was one of those days  when I try to do something and it takes me 4 hours to understand that its not going to work. Nevertheless I got some things done:

Programming department

• Refactored dialogs (again) to turn them into animation and dialog scripts (scripts for short). This means that now dialogs are a sort of cutscenes where entities can perform animations and stuff.
  • Added scheduler manager to schedule functions to be executed in the future
  • Added waits to the scripts
  • Added animation manager to schedule animations to play in the scripts
  • Added an animation that makes the player entity move in a position relative to where they are
• Fixed bug that made animations perform only once

Other

• Putted itch.io page in the SmolFrogGames twitter account description

That's it, I'm kind of frustrated that today went that way but as my old boss said the first time this happened to me: "There will be some days where you make little to no progress. But you shouldn't be discouraged by that, that's just how this works. Tomorrow we'll work something out." So I'll go get some rest for today and come back tomorrow and kill it (figuratively).

Wednesday

Programming Department

• Refactored class and method names of the old dialog system
• Refactored global hitboxes functions into a factory class (because hitbox functions shouldn't be global EVER)
• Fixed bug that made inputs to pass to a buffered state during waits in scripts
  • This was a problem because the buffered inputs caused dialog to skip after the wait
• Added animations to script to change the player's sprite current frame set
  • This means I can now change what animation the player has during a script (like idle or walking)
• Added animations to script that changes the player sprite frame set depending on the previous frameset
  • This kind of animations allow me to for example make the player sprite begin a walking animation depending on where the player is looking at
• Added animation to script that makes the player move in the direction they are looking
• Added feature that makes movement scripts take collisions into account
• Updated repository's README
• Updated example dialog in debug room with a small animation after the plant says hi:

Art Department

• Made banner for twitter

Thursday

Art Department

• Made around 10 icons for the existing abilities in the demo
• Started  working on remaking character sprites

Writing Department

• Added character's portrait to story organizer
• Wrote a 1260 word story to story organizer give some background and expand on world building

Fryday

Art Department

• Remade character sprite sheet to make the main character look 9 years old (the age he has)

• Created character's sprite sheet
• Created Placeholder art for first area of the game, includes:
  • General Background
  • 3 environmental objects
  • 1 interactuable object

Programming Department

• Documented room view class
• Refactored rooms:
  • Deleted unused parameters
  • Deleted useless and unused methods
  • Updated view classes and calls in level generation
• Updated tools to create rooms to make creating levels easier
• Fixed bug where player sprite renders above object no matter the layer
• Created first area of the game in the code
  • Created file that contains the area's information
  • Added environmental objects
  • Added interactuable object with dialog
• Added "Warp Room" in the debug room to traverse the game fast

And that concludes this week. If I've learned something this week is that I am very slow doing things that aren't programming. In spite of that, I think I can still finish this game by the end of this year taking into account my thesis and work.

In the following weeks I will be working on the first areas and cutscenes of the game up until the first boss. See you next week ~♪