existence log 5: week of fire and snow (Patreon)

because snowing in late summer makes about as much sense as any of my posts

9/6:

• add a second tutorial option, so you can now have tutorials for tRPG systems in case you're new to the genre, or just tutorials for starlight-specific stuff. or neither!
• added a thing to cutscene-opening to close any menus so prevent cases of player menus remaining open on top of dialogue messages during scenes 
• added a bunch of tutorials
• immediately encountered a bug involved a player menu displaying on top of a dialogue message, just to spite me
• added different color hit animations per element and per effectiveness (not-very, normal, super effective)
• fixed a bug where the the jump-to-next unit button was mostly not working and also occasionally yeeted the cursor into the abyss
• fixed a bug where attacking at range with star would still use her melee animations
• added a plugin to print our console output to a text file so that we can have any information about our crash-to-desktop issue
• tried very hard for several hours to convnince said plugin to give me any useful information
• failed
• cass correctly identified the general problem within about 10 minutes again. it's a memory leak.
• started looking into that with the built in profiler but found a lot of garbage and not much helpful

9/7:

• brought perry in and Began Playtest with Another Human Being
• crashed partway through
• determined that this crash was caused by the preloader, like all unfortunate things in life are
• fixed above crash, which was due to reinforcement character sprites not being preloaded (since they didn't exist in the map in the first place-- reasonable.)
• fixed a bug where the tutorial for ranged combat repeatedly showed up in every circumstance except ranged combat.
• fixed a bug caused by several QoL features overlapping that caused the cursor to not lock in place when choosing which direction to wait a unit in
• made a new method for cursor QoL for the above fix
• found a way to replicate the CtD! just by doing nothing but going in and out of the summary screen, for about ten minutes straight.
• let me tell you how fun testing that was, by the way:
• not.
• added a thing to tell the preloader to not bother trying to preload the map if we are just coming back from summary or combat (it wasn't re-loading anything, but it -was- checking to see if anything needed to be reloaded each time)
• realized that, despite the preloader, the map file was being reloaded each and every time we came back from combat/summary
• wondered why we even have preloaders if it's just gonna be like that
  (for the record, that is RMMV's fault, not mine. just puttin' that out there. >3> same is true of its default menu system and such)
• told it to not reload the map file each time, you dumb bitch code
• it listened flawlessly! i totally expected that to break literally everything and have to save the existing map state to memory but uhh nope it just works
• also it's SO MUCH FASTER
• which is
• super tilting
• for different reasons
• why even be reloading the map in the first place then you baboon
• basically i recreated cass's early optimization adventures as posted on her devblog, but this time in starlight. and by 'recreated' i mainly mean the emotional exasperation
• srsly what the fuck
• anyway this also seems to have fixed the memory issues and crashes so haha everything makes sense and is good also F U C K
• fixed a bug where text settings would die in the middle of the chapter due to cutscene skip
• finished testplay with perry!!!

9/8:

• added a tutorial for glasya/lynnoe's ability, and a couple other tutorial things that we found missing from playtest
• fixed a bug in the font where tildes would display hopelessly high above the text? what is a font if i can't TILDE~
• fixed a bug where the chapter boss wouldn't move in place if the cutscene was skipped
• buffed HP recovery item to 50% to help new players out (probably just for the demo tho)
• moved some reinforcements around to make a certain part a little easier.....
• added some dialogue to account for certain scenes possibly being skipped earlier
• drew up some more cliff tiles
• 
• was offended again:
• 
• marcello also began looking at making configurable controller support!

9/9:

• made some more Cliff Bits and other tiles!
• pretty much did that all day cuz i was tryna get a Thing right and It Wasn't Right and i eventually died.
• marcello more controller support work! he's got everything set up and so it should theoretically be totally playable on one now!
• in an attempt to make button mapping readable rather than the plugin's default of approach of calling each and every thing on the controller "Button [n]", began writing a method to actually translate that into reasonable glyphs that people might correlate with buttons on a contoller 
• part of that process involved making sure we could rewrite that part. he tested it by doing this:
• 
• you must press Cheese in order to play the game.
• (yes this is the source of the random cheese puns)
• ((or cheesY puns if you will))
• perry fix bug where lynnoe's HP kept getting restored mysteriously every time she hid
• and also fix bug with summary skill icons not updating when switching characters
• and also  found and fix bug where pressing multiple keys in the skill menu could desync the cursor

9/10:

• more tiles!
• lil bit o' mappin'
• falcon finished another set of expressions! got them in game.
• perry started work on a bug where the save file screenshot preview thing wouldn't update when you actually save-- only when you reload the game. originally i thought this would be a simple preloader issue. turns out it is in part a preloader issue, but rather than being simple, it has just been the Monstro Fuckler's Bug From Outer Hell
• rubbed my face against that a bit too
• 
• sped up the save displaying method a lil bit ig.
• but no seriously this bug was suffering. we didnt even fix it yet.
• worked with marcello a bit as we tried very hard to see if we could find a way to automatically identify what type of a controller the player was using. 
• could not find a reliable way to identify what type of controller the player is using.
• also my PS3 controller is very confused and insists that it is an Xbox controlller...
• ...apparently that is just what PS3 controllers do?
• decided to add an option for players to check what controller type they're using instead.

9/11:

• some music stuff
• some minor fixes to the last combat model
• more more tiles!
• went over the shading of our last combat model, and finished it! all combat models complete!
• falcon finished another character's expressions again! got them in game too!
• perry tries several more things to fix the save bug at some previous recommendations.
• but the future refused to change.
• fuck that bug.

9/12:

• more more more tiles
• expanded the options menu so we have more room for More Options
• added a function to append things like wings or sweat drops to message art so that we can handle those without having to export a million files or move a bunch of pictures separately
• added some extra sprite stuff for story events
• at long last, perry DEFEAT the save bug. rather than figuring out how to update files mid playthrough, we worked out a system where we just generate a hash of random numbers to create a unique id for each preview image and then we just get that so we don't have to reload the thing.
  but dfdkfghjbdkfghbdfjghbdfjghdf
  freedom at last anyway
• bless perry tbh

oh man i feel like i had more to say at the end of this post
i probably do
but now that im here idk
it's been such a long ride
sophie im so tired

so i know i said i was gonna do some spontaneous streams. have not forgotten that. also feel like i haven't done anything that's good to stream because i am mostly finishing up the end-of-chapter stuff that, if anything was going to be a spoiler in a demo chapter, it would be this?
so i am mixed feelings.
but have not forget.
we will see what we can do still. 

game is getting stable enough that i can stop trying to stop the bleeding and start trying to add new things... filling in enough of the giant hole that smaller holes are now appearing to fill in... this feeling... is it..... progress??
...or am i just tired?????

no one can truly know..........................