Jul 8, 2021

a clip from my second devlog... you should watch it :>

Inventory UI

I did get to implementing it before porting the game over, but I realized the box to the right of the list could probably look a bit better, so it needs some tweaks. As I mentioned earlier I decided to port the game to Godot 4 which I thought would be fine since the project is mostly art and not much code. But then Godot failed to convert the old project. I still believed it would be fine since there was only a handful of features in the game anyway and it wouldn't take too long to rewrite them from scratch. Plus I could just look at my old code. Then I started the rewrite and... rewriting code is really boring

Party Follow

So following party members are a bit tricker in 3D. The main issue I need to solve is how they handle being obstructed by something they can scale. I sorta want to put jumping into their state machine but I'm lazy so for now they teleport. I had a slight issue where when they teleported somewhere they could crush the player controller into the ground... it might still be an issue I need to test it more haha.

If you were curious about how their path-finding works it's something like this:

A. Determine the vector between the current position and the player position ignoring the y-axis. B. Add vector to velocity to move in the player's direction. C. If one of 6 ray casts reports collision and velocity is close to zero pick another direction to walk in for a while before resuming from step A.

I could use the built-in navigation stuff Godot has but it needs to be baked and I sorta want to avoid that with how much I like to tweak the environment sometimes. Idk it works well enough for now but there is totally room for improvement haha.

Super annoying lag bug

So this is a bug I've had for awhile, and thanks to level switching, I know it's sorta localized to scenes. But it has nothing to do with scene contents. I ended up porting the game without figuring out why it happened, I'm trying really hard to keep my code clean to avoid replicating it again lol.

Jul 1, 2021

idk if you've noticed but like I queued up all these posts so my page could run itself for awhile. I've noticed that my blog's current theme only makes the videos look super nice but the images are displayed too small and it kinda ruins the aesthetic tbh

oh yea I guess I should add this is showcasing battler selection. it's pretty fancy.

April 23, 2022

took about a year and a half but now you can do not battle things and switch to battle things.

Mar 2, 2022

If twitter dies and I didn't punt everything over in time, just know that I post everything on discord first. If discord or my hard drive dies, that's when I'm screwed (I really should back up the project tonight or something)

Banter Box

Implemented! I like it but it does add extra button presses to something some don't enjoy while in the middle of gameplay... maybe I should save it for cutscenes?

NPC Reactivity

It's a small thing, but I added this system so that other game objects can pull the attention of NPCs nearby so that it seems like they are reacting to what the player or environment does. I really need to look into drawing more sprites, all my game characters have so little in terms of expression. It's a bit sad...

New Frame Plus (on Youtube) has a series called The Animation of Final Fantasy. It is a really good look at the importance of animation and its impact on storytelling. I plan to use whatever I can from the series to guide how I animate and express my game visually. I don't know if on my own I'll even scratch the multitude of means by which Square Enix did the impossible, but I like to dream.

Jul 20, 2021

Characters can't be revived mid-battle.