#im not going to make a sots tag bc i dont really intend to talk about it very much. maybe if i go back and clean it but probably not

[fivegaze]

3.31

mm heres what i did today- i added the combo system (where you have to follow the key sequence on screen to add damage to your attack), fixed what was wrong with it (i kept trying to access the scene variables not realizing that with an additive scene there would be two science variables objects and it was trying to pull from the wrong one.) when that stopped being broken (aka i just plopped the whole thing into the same scene which felt like an anticlimactic solution but hey) i finally fit it into the state machine. it's not fully functional yet, but when i sat down they weren't even connected at all

there she is! my incredibly janky combo system. please ignore the way everything just stacks on top of each other that's not. staying there i am going to animate it. none of these ui graphics aside from the menu buttons and text choices are final btw i am not leaving those govt street sign ass arrows in there.

this is what the state machine looks like for the combo system :] i called it combo crusher <3 i always worry that my state machines look really janky and cluttered but i guess that doesn't matter as much as if it's working lol. ummm one day i'll learn C# (and html because god lmao) but for now it's just me and my little visual scripting machines against Da World.

the second pic here is how i'm currently detecting input which feels silly to me but there's no event block for "any key down" just this one so that's what i'm doing for now. my blatant abuse of on update is what got me into such a Freaking pickle with something's on the station. fun fact that game is Not built with fungus like space case and the VN scenes for soul squad. i wanted to do it myself and i spent so long building a prototype for UI that i didn't even end up using at all that by the time it was time to plug in the dialogue i didnt really have a lot of time to work the system out. so it's just the world's worst dialogue system. do you wanna see it it's SO bad

i can't even fit it into one screenshot. every time you click the "advance dialogue" button it checks to see if you're on the last line and if not it's like okay what line ARE you on then. at which point it pulls from a list of every voice line (unlabeled and barely organized btw) and corresponding dialogue line which is, like, fine, okay, whatever, and ALSO,

IT'S CHECKING WHAT LINE YOU'RE ON EVERY FRAME and just going through a giant if/else chain to make sure the right characters are active. also on every frame it's updating the text color, just in case. also sometimes more than one character is active and it just completely breaks the color coded character text. like okay this could definitely be worse but it sure could be better. i'm being overly self-critical bc i'm an annoying perfectionist (to the incredible detriment of my wellbeing and productivity, obviously) so the fact that it was all completed during a semester gives me SO much room to self-crit. i'm still really proud of it even though i ran out of time to bugfix and i didn't have time to level any of the audio or clean up any of the voice lines. (seriously though this is me being proud of something i make i just don't know how to not like pick my work apart. /neutral.)

anyway this is supposed to be a soul squad update so let's move on from that

this is the turn system btw! combo crusher is brand new. i already have a (time consuming) move selection set up which is irritating bc i'm gonna have to go in and undo everything so i can add a new movelist but i'm moving that out of the priority spotlight(tm) because um my (writing) scripts are NOT done and i need them to be done. cheers and light and love this is gonna be such a meaty github upload im pumped. i love writing myself little devlogs for me and me only. like a little treat

anyway that's all i did today besides go to an extremely short job interview which was cool. i really hope i get the job because i would like to be able to afford rent :D

#soul squad #dev diary #im not going to make a sots tag bc i dont really intend to talk about it very much. maybe if i go back and clean it but probably not