[August Housekeeping] existence log stardate A.8.6.2020X (Patreon)

sh this post
...heck.

for patrons who pledged/upped in july: 

• y'all've been added to credits list, let me know if you want off or on under a certain name
• supporter group has been set up where possible
• for higher tier rewards feel free to let me know-- i know i have one of you pending right now. 

--

for a content update, let's just keep going with our previous format.

7/30:

• following up on the thing from my previous post, continued to work on a feature to update parts of the map in game via blitting
  (blitting is basically: take image A; take image B; slap part of image B onto image A at spot XY)
• found that blit would work ONLY if something was blitted onto the map at map-creation step. as in, it would not work at that step, but doing and failing during that step made it work later on
• spent hours trying to find any reason or justification for why this would be the case; failed
• eventually fixed the issue by just blitting a non-existent image onto every map during creation.
  computers, amirite.
• considered how to directly update the passability of a map to match that, starting with investigating how passability is stored for a map object
• turns out it is stored like this:
• 
• ... it's the above for 3000 lines.
• decided not to try and directly update the passability of a map. 

7/31:

• worked on music a bit more; mostly decided to chill since birthday
• hades stream was fun tho, thanks to anyone who came for it!

8/1:

• decided to immediately start working again as soon as the clock hit 12:01.
• fixed a bug that caused player reinforcements to not be able to attack because of an incompatibility between my code and the reinforcement plugin
• set up a system for stairs and other activated events to be able to know and adjust to which unit is activating them
• fixed a bug where if lynnoe used her ability to hide in glasya, the game just assumed she was dead and crashed to shame the player for killing her
• also adjusted system so that story events would always have access to her unit id even if it kept changing because of her jumping in and out of the battle
• fixed a bug where a dead enemy kept showing up as hoverable with 0 hp
• 
• 
• fixed a bug where glasya couldn't attack even with lynnoe
• realized with horror that this is just the beginning of a probably-never-ending list of bugs with this ability in particular 
• realized with additional horror that i have no one to blame for this but myself.

8/2:

• added an AI pattern to start moving only when the player steps into attack range
• tried to add an AI pattern to patrol between two points but realized that was way more involved than she would have liked
• added a targeting setting to AI so i can set up multple unit targets or event points for something like the above
• finally replicated the double-parry bug that was haunting me for weeks !!!!!
• 
• realized that this was specifically happening because of a temporary band-aid i put on that just made which attack the enemy would crit on random
• fixed the above by adding a more consistent crit system, though it still has to be expanded to properly base off of stats in the future
• added an optional property to units to disable crits for story/balance purposes

8/3:

• pretty much just worked on music all day, but i now have most of a title screen song! will post it after making some more adjustments. 

8/4

• forgot how to exist in any meaningful capacity

8/5

• tried to fix a bug in the objective system that was causing it to not complete when units were within a given area
• fixed a bug that caused it to crash when passed a non-existent unit
• realized that the original bug i was looking for was just caused by me forgetting my own syntax and having set it up yet
• haha whoops

...and that catches us up.
.......but what i haven't mentioned is that on the side of stuff both in this post and the last i've still been working more on setting up the story and demo and pushing that forward more and more so that this system can actually be playable. music aside, everything i've been detailing here is basically just what's getting the way of actually making the story-- since as usual i can't exactly go posting a whole lot of that yet.

as of yesterday, i think i've hit the halfway point for the demo's content. that definitely doesn't mean half the work is done-- it's more than that; probably much more. but it's the halfway point as far as what players would see.
lots of placeholders, lots of bugs still, lots of polish remaining, but i think it'll be much easier to work with all that and see the strides made once there is a fully functioning chapter to just plug it into. 

we're getting there.

streams for this month, all saturdays, all at 3p MST and you can check what time that is for you here ! 

• 8/8    
• 8/15
• 8/29

these will all be for starlight, but i struggle to figure out exactly what each of them will be at this exact moment and we may end up playing some of them by ear. we'll see. i suspect most of them will probably be at least vaguely graphics-oriented. 

pls come is more fun with ppl ok thx
bye see you next time i become briefly aware of the passage of time