Continue Your Game: The Jam Daily Devlog #6​

Hello, back at you again with another Daily Devlog! This time, actually daily! Imagine that! Anyways, todays been mostly another refactoring day. Thats not to say there's no new content, but it is to say that its not quite ready to show to the world just yet. Sorry, but you'll have to wait for the save format update to check out the new stuff (outside of the couple of dialog changes cheekily slipped into yesterdays update).

The first thing that got updated today was the game's chest/item container system. The prior system involved setting a value in the chest object in the room itself that determined which index would be used within a massive list of variables simply labelled as "miscFlags".

...this is, as you may expect,a very bad idea that isn't very conducive to knowing exactly which value is mapped to what. It's error prone, obtuse to read, and also means that I have to expand the massive, nameless list of flags every time I add too many chests for it. Oh. Did I forget to mention that this very same list of miscellaneous flags is used in other places as well? This is uh...yeah. Not what I initially meant when I posted back in 2022 that I wanted to fix up the save system, but nonetheless, fixing this is a pretty big step in making sure the save system doesn't break between updates.

So, much like the combat system, I've begun to gut this miscFlags system, in order to replace it with something far more maintainable. As of today's changes to the code, the game's flagging system now makes use of a Dictionary structure, which allows these values to be mapped to a human-readable key, and also should allow for adding these keys and values to the new save format easily. Also, it's far simpler to both check for a list of opened containers, as well as add new ones, since these names should now be intuitive, and automatically generated. It's still not...great, don't get me wrong. It generates the key based off of the room ID and the container's name in the scene (generating a result similar to "3_Chest2_Collected"), but it's still way better than having nothing to go off of, and is still subject to change later.

In a similar vein, the next change Ive made is to change the way dialog portraits are stored. Currently in the game, these are also stored as just a list of numbers in a single array. Making use of Dictionaries in the same way allows me to now sort them by character and expression, meaning that adding new spoken dialog is far simpler than referring to the massive spreadsheet of file paths. After adding a bit of hacky code to the part of the Dialog object that sets the profile image (and by that, I mean hardcoding to check the values of the only three that get actually USED in the current game), this new system works like a charm!

Thankfully, that hardcoded system wont be there for long, because not long after that, I got to work on reorganizing every dialog string in the game, in preparation for the new dialog system. I even took the opportunity to write a few extra ones! With any luck, the dialog system should be fully updated by the end of tomorrow, but for now, I leave you with this devlog. Theres no new release for these changes just yet, and Ill be refraining from making a new release until I finally have the save system for the game in a place I like it. (Sorry to fans of fleeing from battles! I swear, you wont have to wait too much longer for that fix!)