the creator of the gregorian calendar's birth name was "ugo". we use the Ugo Calendar system. (Patreon)

when going through the commit log i was reminded that there are a handful of changes worth mentioning that i have Slept !! on talking about.
and like
they're not that worth mentioning, they matter, you might notice and appreciate them, but you might not, we're not gonna spend a whole post on any of them. 

so today, let's go through the Microfeature Manifest and talk about some of the improvements we've been making on the side.
and by "we".... i mostly mean perry.
while the rest of us have been off in lala-art-land  twiddling our paintbrushes or rebooting our tablet pressure settings, or whatever it is those of us who make assets do, perry has been steadily working away in the code-mines. so, shoutout to perry.

Enemy ranges showing movement

This one was a user request following the demo. So, in the demo, when you hover an enemy, it shows their attack range. Like GBA fire emblems, that range was all red! Because enemy! Danger! But that makes it difficult to see how far they can actually move vs just how far they can attack. So now when hovering, movement and attack range are distinct like for your units.

Standardized Unit Creation 

Okay, this one isn't front-end so you won't see this change, but it bears mentioning because it is The Way of the Future. In the demo, units were defined like this:

This system of comments is basically how trainers are defined in Reborn, by the way! Anyway, if this is a generic unit, and there's like five of them, and we want to lower their HP by three points, then we have to go edit each of the events individually. Tedious! Not good juju!

Now, units can be created based on a class and level like one would expect:

Where that 'unitClass' line is now pulling most of the work. But, we can still define (or modify, rather than set equal outright) specific stats per unit if we do end up wanting.
We'll need a different system for player characters, and that's not a real class but to demonstrate, but this is a first step for class-based progression! We'll come back to this in the future.

Diagonal Cursor Movement

This is for the controller users out there, and this gif is awkward because i'm decidedly not using a controller to demonstrate, but:

8 directional movement! Another requested feature has been the full 360 directional control and then snap to grid, but that's much more of an ordeal. It's on our to-do list but no promises on it being soon. Still, fluidity and crispness of cursor movement is a high priority for me. My goal is for no one to ever have to think about it.

Snap on Cursor Tap

Another minor one not mentioned in the commit log but in line with the above. Sometimes, just moving one space can be a bit tedious. That's also true in Reborn. The ideal solution probably involves slowing the cursor down on the first tile movement, and we may yet do that, but in the meantime there's now a brief pause on the first tile of movement when first moving, to help only select one tile at a time. When holding, no pause.

And None Of That Matters For Keyboard Anymore Because Mouse Controls

Perry's spent a lot of time on this one. I won't be showing this directly, but my request was for turns to be able to be completed solely by using the mouse and not the keyboard. Left click is choose, right click is back. The cursor now immediately jumps to where you click instead of you having to wait for it to scroll there, (and, in the demo it wouldn't even go all the way because back then I was a fool of a took). 

Z-Layering

Another back end change, but it's great for us so I'll mention-- Perry reinstated Z-layering! This means we can now freely stack images top to bottom in whatever order we want much easier. Before this change, we were forced to layer via Javascript's native structure, which was "whatever is drawn last is on top*".
*unless you tell it "oh and actually we drew this earlier please believe me"

That has caused pain at times! I like not being in pain!

Full Screen Persists Through Reset

Reborn didn't get this one until e19! But where we're now in 1080p, it's kind of important. I don't think I need to say more on that.

Idle Info Hover Cat

This one isn't a feature, but a cat that was kind of obnoxious in the demo. There are these underwhelming tooltips:

But they were a little brokedie-do-dah so they'd stick around forever even when you actually used those buttons or entered a menu. That was obnoxious! It is fixed now.

Art Guides

One point of confusion in the demo was how to use Arts. The process is that you choose to do so, and then you choose the art, and then you choose the target. This was unclear! We now have some brief tip text that pops up to clarify what's next.

It's an improvement, but there is going to be more work to be done here for sure. One requested feature from the demo was a pop up showing what each art actually does, and that's definitely still on my radar, but we'll get there after we get a bit more familiar with the progression of unlocking and upgrading arts in the first place.

Ok, I think that's most of the small stuff for now? At least, the small things that don't fit in the like other two categories of stuff. More posts on those later!! Always more posts !!!

This post has been brought to you by babie child.

Also!!! I said I would post them I think so have a few random photos from some of the aforementioned holiday events that I went to instead of streaming this weekend kjdfgkjfg

This is from a local authentic German Christmas Market, or so I'm told. I don't really know what makes it authentic or German besides some of the food, but they had cool stuff and pretty lights.

Inside that big tree, looking up:

And an artisan smore they had! Smores are german, right? This is a rainbow marshmallow over cotton candy and animal crackers and white kitkat and chocolate and ice cream cone:

And unrelated to any of the above, here are some pretty pictures from our local botanic garden light-up event:

the above one changed color and danced to various tunes!

his real name was ugo. imagine that. imagine being named ugo at birth. wouldn't that suck? wouldn't you never live it down? wouldn't it just crush your entire spirit? you should become the pope about it.