Devlog 19: 26.06...2.07.2023

Hello! Welcome again to a greglog instance. Reading some old (REALLY old) greglogs, I realised I miss the older style that's more than just a laconic change log. So here is an attempt at doing better...

What did I do this week? Git commit titles, assemble!!!!!!

Monday. Since the last few weeks were very slow progress-wise, getting back up to speed took a while. On Monday, I refactored some code and attempted fixing issues regarding one npc. I haven't tested those fixes yet... Hope they work!!!!

On Tuesday, I adjusted some text inside a cutscene, and I like it a bit better now. Then I drew a new logo!

new logo

You can also see it at the top of the page now.

I changed cars so their path points can now force them to pause for a specified amount of time. This plays into the next thing...

police station

There now is a police station in town. Yeah. And the police car can now stop on its way to park behind the store. I thought it would be funny if the police only moved between the station and the store. The police people themselves... I know that in quite a few places around the world, the police are a rather corrupt and violent organisation, so I won't be portraying them that sympathetically. I only realised after writing "a corrupt and violent organisation" that this description fits the Greg police too, somewhat. Oh well.

The mean cashier who could be fought left some loose ends open in the code back when I implemented that feature. I patched some crashing bugs but need to tie it into the story as well... Maybe the police can help there.

New tree! And reeds! For the lakeside scenes.

tree and reeds

I also drew the police guys.

police. the other one looks the same

Now it's Wednesday! I started by drawing portraits for the police. The funny joke here is that they are palette swaps of each other.

police face

By that point I had decided that the police would be involved in some sort of bounty system. I started integrating ideas of that into the police station interior, items such as a bounty board and jail cells. Essentially, bounties are an amount of a specific enemy type that one has to defeat to receive a reward from the police.

This leads into Thursday, which was the day when I finished the bounty system. And by system, I mean the data interpretor. Because I still have to make data (dialogue, rewards).

On Thursday, in a tangent, I made Greg's armour visible in the overworld. Check it out.

greg with biking helmetgreg with cool jacket

And on another 1AM tangent, I started working on a campfire. I had made a decorative campfire spot in town without thinking much of it, but now that I added a raw meat item (oh yeah I added a raw meat item) I thought "hey you should be able to cook this.... oh my lordy lord there is a campfire". So yeah.

Mentioning that I never ever seem to mention all the new dialogue I have to write as I make new systems. Well, I write tons of new dialogue as I make new systems.

It's been Friday so far as of writing this! And on Friday, I finished up the last currently possible bounties (made them obtainable and give rewards).

you really want to cookegg?

The campfire now uses a new "exchanges" system to have cooking recipes, essentially. I added the egg item specifically to be cooked here.

Oh, and the exchanges sytem. It's a resource file with string arrays to specify required input items and then given output items. If you have all the inputs, you get all the outputs. It also nicely tells you about the required inputs through the dialogue system, and that functionality was not pretty to code. Yeah. But it works!

Through this week I've started to gain interest in writing absolutely horrible, obfuscated code. My favourite example...

*that* function.

Thank you Godot devs for letting me do this. You do have to get kind of creative when wanting to fit everything into one line, since if and for and other such statements require that they are superseded by indented statements.

I thought it was music coming from outside but it was my headphones on my desk. Have been blasting this on loop recently, I suspect it somehow made me more productive yesterday. Or maybe it was because I spent mornings offline. I should keep doing that the coming month.

Saturday I think! I think we're on Saturday now! Uh, that day was slow because I was on youtube instead. I did stay up until 1 am to code something, though. Wait.. did I do that... I did add stronger enemy variants to the usual thug enemies that only activate when a condition is fulfilled. Yeah. And there were also bug fixes and stuff. Don't know about anything else.

This brings us to Sunday (today). And I've been more productive! I added a new character.

kid

And by "new" I mean "I had the art for more than a month but didn't bother implementing them yet". But I did now. This is a kid who buys and sells items from you. For you. Yeah.

I also began implementing a cutscene. I didn't write down what I want it be be like or where it should end up so I just started winging it and took a break from it now because.

Changed some things about the biking minigame... uh, fixes... and you can also get Mail Man's hat now, if you play good for a while. Yeah.

Enough for this week! The end was arduous to write. So I've had enough.

Goodbye.