Continue Your Game: The Jam Daily Devlog #1

Back by...surprisingly popular demand, Reflection Reverie, getting the first update in two month-
...sorry. Two years.

This joke somehow aged simultaneously really well and really, really poorly...

Anyways, I'm back with you again for the first update to the game in two years. Due to the age of this project, a lot of time was spent cleaning up some atrocious old code and fixing minor bugs. Despite this, there's still at least a few things to show.

The first, and definitely the least interesting part of the update is that an issue with the game's event runner that erroneously only allowed the cutscene system to execute one command per frame has now been fixed. Despite how difficult this was in the moment for me to figure out (and this was an issue even in the most recent build, as the intro cutscene in the public build has a noticeable visual error for a few frames due to this issue),turns out fresh eyes was all that was needed to spot that the issue.  (...well, are they really that fresh after such a long time) In the end, it was caused by a condition in the code making use of a greater than comparison, rather than a greater than or equal to comparison.
Whoops.

The second is quite a bit more interesting. If you're somehow the sort of person curious enough to check the source code of the GBJam build, you may have noticed comments in the battle system like this one:

#hacky system, needs something more elegant, but later, ABSOLUTELY later

Well, good news, it's time for something (marginally) more elegant. The next focus was improving the battle system, which should improve gameplay as well as make adding additional content easier. Here's a quick list of what that's entailed so far:

• Enemy attacks are now handled in their own scripts, rather than being hardcoded into the battle script.
• Battle encounters can now have custom backgrounds. (Originally in the game's code, this was handled by a value set to 0, 1, or 2, based on whether the encounter was a normal encounter, miniboss, or boss battle. No, I have no idea why I did it this way either.)
• Battle encounters can now set their own music. (This was originally hardcoded to just the one battle theme.)
• Battle encounters can now have their own set of enemies. Did you know that in the current public build, this is hard coded into the game, and will always give you a set of 3 of the game's most basic enemies? Because I sure didn't!

As a result of these changes, hopefully new enemies can be added in the coming days far more easily than they could have before. Stay tuned for the next update, and fingers crossed this one doesn't also take two years to make.