Hello everyone!

Today is Monday which means it's time to hop on the devlog. I hope everyone enjoyed their weekend. I got a chance to do some fun things this Saturday, so it was kinda nice to take that breather from the mundaneness of work. But enough about me, I want to tell you all about my updates for my game!

Cut Scenes for Tiro Town

would you believe me if I told you I still wasn't done with all of the cut scenes for Tiro Town? I know, I'm sorry, making cut scenes in unity has been quite.... bothersome. I have created the code, the design, and written out for the most part how I want the cut scenes to go, but  when considering a) the sheer number of cut scenes I need to do for this story that they will be decision based compared to the current installment and b) the amount of logic coding I need to implement to figure out which cut scene will play over another, I think I need more time to streamline the coding logic for cut scenes, and do some more research on how cut scenes should be made in general. The reason I decided to give myself 3 months for Tiro Town is so that I won't fall into the habit of hard coding anything that makes the game code unstructured and unorganized, and I feel like with the cut scene logic it's starting to become the case.

Move Generator

Speaking of hard coded code that was unstructured and unorganized, I have decided that I would also be changing how I generate moves in the game. Where before each move was hard coded and instantiated in the cs file to be pulled from later, I have used an encrypted csv file that holds all the moves' information, and instead used the cs file to extract the necessary data from the csv file, and create a move based off the information. Though this method was definitely harder than hard coding all the moves, here was why I ultimately decided to go with this approach:

Hard coding moves is easy but tedious:

It may be easy to instantiate one move, but canonically speaking, I planned on having at least 151 moves in the game, to which each specific archetype could only have access to about 20 moves by leveling up alone. This was going to be a lot of moves to make just to cover my bases on which archetype was going to be picked in the game, and that wasn't very feasible or smart. 

Future Proofing Game

In an attempt to "future proof" the game, I code needed to be more dynamic or flexible. Hard coding the moves in the CS file worked for the current installment because I didn't need to code 151 moves. But in the future I will, and I think it would be better to keep all that in a csv file so that it doesn't bog down the code, and take up more space in memory than hard coding it.

Unfortunately, this means that I need to make updates to my save feature, because it was saving/loading moves in a game by finding the hard coded instantiated move, which just isnt the case. I now to figure out how to implement this new method of creating data objects from csv into the save feature.

My goals

I plan on finishing all of the cutscenes for Tiro Town by next Monday, and at least learning on how I can improve on making them for the purposes of future proofing. I also plan on creating csv files for items, quests, characters, and anything else that was hard coded in game that works better as a dataset in a file than taking up space in the game. Let's hope the implementation of these won't be too hard because I haven't been that good at completing my goals at all since I started making weekly Goals lol.

I also want to say much love and thank you to anyone who has been reading the dev logs for as long as you have, we are officially in month 3 of 6! I really hope you can stick with me on the journey by reading the posts, giving a like, a comment, and follow. 

I'll see you all in the next update!