I will obtain temporary freedom from the tyranny of higher education this Monday. How exciting! I have been coding. Recently I started talking to TDS, who really nudged me to take a more confident crack at Ruby stuff. And I want to be more useful for Adventure Ace stuff because so far I have managed to contribute nothing but a small handful of more refined art. I PROMISE I’LL DO BETTER GUYS oh wait wrong game page for that. OTL This blog talks about things I have done over the general course of the month as recently I’ve been surprisingly busy with said higher education.

The most notable thing I’ve done for DS so far, aside from cleaning up some interface organization, is redoing the way stats are distributed. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, it’s this:

Originally I’d evented it with Modern Algebra’s ATS, but it was clunky to use, and the code itself was a tedious mess.


Compare the end result of coding it in with Ruby, which has the added bonuses of 1)being much simpler, and 2) being accessible directly from the menu, rather than through an item. The point of bringing this up being Ruby knowledge is a useful thing! And a skill like any other! If you work at it and practice, you'll learn and do cool things like a cool person!

On an unrelated note, extra thanks to everyone who let me suckle on their tender opinions. I sincerely hope they aren’t sore after all that suckling. I still don’t know how, exactly, I plan on handling the visual display for battles, but I have a lot more food for thought!

Recently I’ve done what I refer to as “project spring cleaning”. I took the time to update all my documentation: excising all the deleted skills from the database and making sure they can’t be fused or otherwise accessed, updating the excel spreadsheet that acts as an organized list of skills, making a new fusion chart so I know which skills mix together, looking at my notes for each level and re-writing a few things, cleaning up some old writing/art… Just a lot of STUFF. Skills are very, very important to have streamlined and polished up because without a finished database I don’t have a clear idea of what each fight consists of, and I don’t recommend trying to make enemy AI when you don’t know what they’re capable of and it is just a good idea to have them all shiny and squeaky clean.

I hope it doesn’t sound like a whole lot of FAFFING ABOUT. Who knows, maybe it is? I’ve been approaching development from a viewpoint of “working on the game” rather than “working on the demo”, if that makes sense. It’s a subtle change in wording, but an important one. In the interest of full disclosure, I’m not much closer to a demo than I was in November, when I was so adamant about getting something out during fall. I still haven’t animated a lot of things that need animation, and the first level needs to be tied together, plus I need to finish the general…MAKERING of the actual fights. (Not as daunting as it sounds, that last part – I already have a system to base AI shenanigans on, and have documented the specifics of each battle quite well, so I know what needs to happen.)

That being said, I’m leaps and bounds closer to a functional game. You can sit down and play stuff and I’ve worked out the known bugs in the custom game system. I’ve considered releasing some kind of tech demo but so far have decided against it since I feel like I, personally, would get more use out of asking for some beta testers.

I’m also continuing my general pattern of just… not updating very often. I worry that it might look like the project is stagnating, but I ask people to have some faith when I say “YO I’M WORKING ON IT”. This is asking a lot! Do YOU see any completed games here? I just see one team effort and my eternal state of being captured in .gif form. I am extremely flattered that as of this posting 79 people thought this was worth clicking that little orange “subscribe!” asterisk, when there is no download, the images consist of outdated screens and a fistful of art, and I vomit up .gifs and tomfoolery in the blog posts. People think there’s potential in this! That’s really just a super flattering thought and I’m grateful for the support. I mean, I haven’t even posted a 201029283 page excerpt of the compelling novel adaptation that explores the MC’s extensive backstory as a goat herder on the rocky slopes of Death Mountain. How do y’all know this will be good??? But the more I go on and on about things without something playable to show, the more time people have to form expectations I know I won’t live up to.

So I think I’d much prefer to work quietly and update whenever I have something significant to post about. Of course sometimes I consider vibrating arms to be significant.

I need to just make a page and name it ‘shenanigans’ for this kind of stuff.