Devlog #043 (Patreon)

It's been pretty busy for me these last 3 weeks, but I still managed to do most of what I wanted.

First of all, here is the new exploration UI. There used to be a heart in the bottom left, but what I had in mind for it kinda sucked, so I decided to remove it, and instead show a picture of the place you're in, and what floor you're on. The book on the right is the almanach, which you'll be able to access at any time to check your quests, the bestiary, recipes, and more.

I haven't implemented this UI yet. Most of what I did is stuff that you, the player, won't notice. The main thing I did was to prepare which variables need to be saved. In the current demo, everything resets when you reload the game, but that obviously won't be the case in the final version, and so I need to save which lever has been activated, which chest has been opened, etc. Some resources, such as the apples that grow on trees, will respawn every x steps. Leaving the area and reloading the game won't reset these resources. However, it will reset random encounters, whether they are fights or NPCs. So that's what I did, and while I was at it, I also sorted a lot of other variables. As things were, everything was loaded at all times, which is okay when there is 4 monsters, 8 items and 10 rooms, but things would have become real bad real quick once i would have gotten to 100+ monsters, 500 items, 3000 rooms, and even more stuff.

So a lot of preparations, sorting, and improving/fixing code when I could. Not the most fun thing I had to do this far for sure.

In fact, I had to take my mind off of it for a bit after I was done, and drew something unrelated to the game. I posted it on both Pixiv and Deviantart, if you want to take a look!

After that, I realized I still had to rework the way the character's sprites work so they take less space in memory, and also to prepare the code for skins. I don't think I ever mentionned it, but every character will have a few unlockable color palettes.

So yeah, that's all taken care of, and the plan is now to improve the exploration, make it feel better, add new actions such as grabbing items with the right click, better pickups, money... I'll also implement the UI once that's done, and add menus such as shops, the map, storage and all that. But I'll tell you more about it once it's actually done! :)

And that's it for now.

Hope you enjoyed the update, see you in 3 weeks! :D