dgbaumgart

Adventures in text parsing:
- an empty cell with newlines and some? spaces no longer blows up the load-from-CSV-file function for that rule only
- a commented-out line (using #) in a previous line no longer removes only the last item in a block of scripts that ends with a quote character (really.)

Here's a bit of dialog where Wormsy is escaping with the help of a friendly crow. (I see crows and goblins as potential allies, provided the goblins are willing to give up some number of snax and/or shinies.) Note also: the objectives widget on the right side has an expand/collapse button (WHICH WORKS). To explain the significance of this dialog, which is quite old: I changed how a lot of dialog script commands and basic timing things work ie. how a camera moves and how the game waits for it to finish, or not, before executing more commands. So when I loaded up scenario 2 (this one) I found that telling the camera to spend 2 seconds panning to Wormsy wasn't working - it'd move in about .3 seconds then fire the next thing. Turns out the time wasn't being used *at all*. Fixed that, then: the map was pitch black until *after* the camera finished moving. What? It turns out the map fog wasn't updated until the next step of game start. Fixed that. Then: no fog at all, no map connections drawn 'til the camera got to Wormsy. I was calling the functions to update map fog and refresh map connection visuals too late in game start. Fixed it. Then: opening the dialog flashed the background then faded quickly to black. Weird! Well- this is actually a dev command I set up, but I'd like to be able to *start* the dialog with a black background because it involves Wormsy waking up from unconsciousness with no idea where she is, so it fits to have the black fade to the background art after a few lines of text. So: made it so dialog BG color can be set from outside of dialog mode. And so on and so on like this. Just lots of little fixes and adjustments. (I am, of course, going to have to go back and fix the start of the other scenarios because they were janked together using slightly broken commands that now work correctly. Such is game dev!)

It is #GoblinFriday!

Diving (back) into the third scenario "The Small Escape". It starts w/ Wormsy escaping from a caged wagon. Or not.

I'm diving in & fixing anything broken, slightly broken, or annoying.

Example: big gob of weird execution order/timing problems at game start (more in alt text).

100%. We were only going to get one, but then saw them together and realized it would be impossible to separate them.

Luci with big big yellow eyes (that want food, probably) on his red blanket, which always makes him look quite striking.

He's a good boy

Tiny kittens that were only 6? weeks old when this picture was taken.

Two year old kittens that are now much less tiny than they once were.

These guys turn 2 today.
<3

More on goblin powers: every goblin char gets a special rule-breaking ability.

Wormsy: 1 free reroll in every die roll
Eyeball: 1 free oooo per turn (powers "magic")
Bennybog: 1 free shiny per turn
Madmug: eats 2 snax per turn, not 1 (but good stats)
Kreeee: (TBD) roll to resist any injury status?

Screenshot of my goblin game. Bennybog has been caught by hoomans (via a test command) and now has bars over his character portrait in the UI. No real need for this, but it's one of those "little touches of joy" that's fun to see in a game. (I mean, sticking goblins in cages isn't joyful, but little unnecessary things where the developer is just having fun are always nice to see.)

Didn't want to think today, so did random little stuff:
- bars now appear on goblin portraits if caught by hoomans
- fixed entity tokens not saving their location slot index correctly!
- added free resources goblin powers ie. +1 shinies/turn
- added "tired" status (no AP regen, must be waited out)

Luci the cat in front of his empty food bowl. His eyes are the o's in the word Food. He wants food.

(not an original concept, but) Luci is trying to tell me something

Screenshot of my goblin game. If you could see the mouse cursor, you'd see it hovering over the "Windy Path" (I kinda love the ambiguity of that name). That location, however, has been set to locked. At some point in cleaning up the movement UX, I lost the little locked icons, so I had to dig back through that code and figure out where it got missed- quite easy. The problem: I didn't like my drawn-in-10-seconds locked icon. So I made a new one that fits with the icon style! Took about a minute.

A screenshot of the dialog mode from my goblin game - in full 1.5x scale for my large primary monitor. Basically I made it so I can hit "D" and load an interrupt where I can dump dev commands into dialog. It should save the previously selected option string so that I can hit a button and return to the same place in dialog, but... I actually do clear it from memory basically immediately. So I'm going to have to put in just a little more effort and save the last trigger/option strings so I can return to a place in dialog. This won't always work, of course - the dialog system can get VERY complex and storing state at every option taken would be overkill. I mean, it will never be used in actual gameplay. I don't plan to allow saving mid-dialog, this is just for helping development. Then again, maybe it is easy? I'll find out... some other time. Right now simply having an autosave and quicksave that work nicely (and dialog rules reloading from disk upon game load) means that iterating the dialog is way faster than before.

Did a bunch of infrastructure:
- save/load config and player profile files (reusing save game code!)
- put all keyboard input handling into one place!!
- fixed missing map connection lock icon (see image for deets)
- cleaned up a developer mode dialog trigger (img for deets)
- and cleaned up Jira!

A screenshot of my Jira page which shows an item "make BubbleZone game map element". It took me quite a while to figure out what the heck past me was talking about here, then it came to me: as a first-take on adding animated elements to the world map, I want to be able to define an Area (that's a Godot object that can be a polygon, an ellipse, a capsule, etc) in which animated bubbles appear out of liquid and pop -- in this case used for the swamp part of the map to liven it up a bit. Not super high priority, but I still do want this. I'll write an actual description so I don't forget what this means again.

Happy #goblinfriday!

Yes, it's a hashtag. I'm good at social media.

Having done a dev build, I'm digging through Jira tickets and figuring out what's now irrelevant, what comes next, and what I need to re?design.

Pictured: it took me a _few_ minutes to figure out what past me was thinking here.

Because I missed the "L" in lawyers when I zoomed in to photoshop the text :(

(It would be funny if it was because of AI though.)

The async stuff is built for multithreading. All that I needed is what amounts to coroutines (in eg. Unity). Async et al is probably fine if you're a more knowledgeable programmer than me, but I learned to code in *art school* with all that entails - and I'm here to make a game, not learn CS!

Got into weird stuff today:
- fixed bug deep in my CSV parsing that dumped entire lines if a comment character ("#") was in *any* part of the line
- replaced NPC turn handling via janky use of C# async (which is more powerful than I need) with a dumb but straightforward sorta FSM design pattern.

Now given I have some time to add new (broken?) (NO) stuff:
- on-map tutorial hint for moving between locations
- add a 'profile' file to store outcomes of scenarios (ie. so you can complete S1 then have choices show up in S2)
- load games from start menu. Bit of an oversight to miss this!

Other fixes:
- locked movement to other areas during tutorial!
- don't allow save/load during dialogs
- ... if game exited during dialog, reloaded, make sure to purge dialog options from previous state!
- fixed broken save/load tooltips
- and, as ever, fixed various content scripting edge-cases

A test case for showing the dice reroll tutorial. I really botched the position calculation so the tutorial element is almost completely off the left side of the screen with just the end of the arrow pointing out.

Here, it works. Not shown: 5 screenshots of the various ways I screwed up the positioning while trying to fix it.

Goblin Friday!

Plowing through a short list of Issues that came up when M. tried to play the game. (As all devs know, the instant a tester even looks at a build, everything breaks.)

Among them, the disappearing dice reroll tutorial hint. Where'd it go?
(See that arrow peeking in from the left?)

This is kinda it, huh.

"AI" tech fundamentally doesn't work as marketed, but working isn't the point. The *point* is to shift distribution of wealth to be more unequal.

That's what trillions of investment $ is buying: never having to pay white collar workers like white collar workers ever again.

In short, it's more profitable to not be evil. And yet!

That's just the thing - a weird crossover psychology-ideology of desire to dominate people surpasses the goal of maximizing productivity, and even the rationalized goal (bracketing out, ahem, externalities) of maximizing profit.

The goal is to be king among slaves, no matter the cost! It's insane.

The Classic Simpsons bit: Lionel Hutz asks "Can you imagine a world without AI?", sees visions of world peace and happiness, then shudders at the thought. This is literally every business executive right now.

literally every business executive

Amazing. I both love and hate this!

The former is kinda interesting! I can see why they make it frictionless though - I don't think an AAA game can really explore the implications therein.

The latter is common eh - but I think my requirement is that it has to be, in-narrative, its own currency that causes FOREX friction!

Ohhh that's neat! Making the resources dual-use in terms of mechanics is probably the most interesting way to do it.

Put that brain to work, we need answers!!!! (no pressure)

(Oh man, gaming in Japan is a whole world that I know so little about!)

I don't think intermediate holder of value quite works - like, I dunno, finding gems in some RPG and selling them for gold doesn't make those gems a currency right? Even if you can use them, they're not 'in another economy'.

Ah! I've played that one - yeah, and as you describe. It's like "separate faction currencies" which is common enough - and doesn't fulfill what I'm looking for exactly...

Darklands (for instance) does interesting stuff with the Fuggers and letters of credit vs weight of coins, but this doesn't count. Lots of examples of condensing value for inconvenience.

How about any game that deals with two or more separate currency economies and the friction between them?

Does *any game* use currency exchange as a mechanic?

I'd constrain the question to just RPGs or something, but I can't think of any. I'd suspect some capitalism-sim might do FOREX? But it feels like "an annoying thing every designer immediately abstracts away".

This is why the phrase comes up in so many of the things I've written about AI.

AI does three main things:

1) dismantle the institutions necessary for democratic society to thrive

2) transfer wealth upwards

3) create the permission structure for (1) and (2)

The poundcake has a large divot eaten out of it. In the background, a blurry little gray tabby cat is pretty sure she didn't see anything unusual happen in the last hour.

Came back to the kitchen and found that SOMEONE ate a big chunk out of the pound cake. Asked around. No one fessed up.

Hmmm.