Aegis Devlog 6 and a Side Project

An Aegis Update 

Well, strapping that UI together for the demo/tester missions sure was a lot more involved than I thought it would be. It's funny how sometimes things are actually very easy to implement even though they sound hard. Customizable palettes for units was very easy to implement and took maybe half an hour of fiddling around, but some of the more finicky data handling things like "swap this pilot's mech for another one" takes much longer, but after a good deal of finicking it came together.

Interface sound effects are also mostly good to go, still playing with a few varieties here and there to see what fits best. Handling the four audio buses and volumes is a delicate balancing act.

Along the way I also resolved two problems that have been plaguing me- or at least were slightly annoying.  

The first was a consistent issue I had with tooltips. Something is up with how Godot handles tooltips, and to get my own panels looking the way I wanted to I needed to overrwrite the built in method. This led to a second problem which was sizing the windows correctly for dynamic text- which was resolved by using PanelContainers to adjust size to the text given. However, after not long of this I noticed another fault, which was a grayish window popping up for maybe a few frames before being filled in with the custom tooltip. After weeks of tinkering and searching around for solutions, it seems like this is something to do with the way Godot 4 processes tooltips natively, so the best solution was to completely overrwrite its tooltips and write in my own- which have come out quite nicely so far with none of the strange popup issue. 

The second problem was one with the VFX getting hung up while the AI was thinking, which turned out to be a relatively easy solution with just a few calls to await get_tree().process_frame here and there. It's fractionally slower during the AI's turns now but the smooth effects and lack of jitter are well worth the cost. 

Progress has been on pause for a few weeks as I chew over a few mechanical questions that I haven't quite sorted out yet and hammer out more animations and sprite work. I've also been tinkering with some of the art redraw but am not quite ready to share that progress as it's still looking rough to my eyes. Additionally, the development of the strategic layer has started and I've figured out how to get a global 3D map and generate locations and such on it- which will be exciting once I have something that looks good enough to show off.

IN THE MEANTIME 

I have so, so many projects sitting in my godot workspace. Some of them are just procedural tweaking or little tests and probably 70% of them are me iterating and getting better and better at working with interactive fiction games. Specifically the journey started with recreating command parsers and Zork-style dungeon explorers which quickly became very involved as I discovered the challenges of hand-coding JSON files of dialogue and use case trees. 

Over time these IF projects evolved into a few different directions trying out a variety of styles and I gradually abandoned the parser in favor of a choice-based system (though the parser will be back some day, stay tuned Bifurcate). While chewing over the ideas for bits and pieces of Aegis I had the itch to go back and tinker with another IF project and so I threw together something new (I'm getting so quick at whipping up a functional IF UI at this point) that I could use to both keep honing my skills with handling dialogue systems as well as put to paper a specific story idea I have been cooking for a bit- something science-fiction. 

After getting the UI together I had the idea for a system called the Pulse, a representation and mesh of both the player character's stream of subconscious thoughts as well as advertisements from nearby locations, scraps of unrecognized conversations and net chatter, etc. I wanted to keep things strictly as text-based as possible to keep me from going down another art rabbit hole and pull attention away from Aegis, so the Pusle became a few running lines of text. 

forgive the FPS, the software I'm using only goes to 30

 Once I got it working and began putting together the dialogue handlers and working on the first few scenes, I kept finding I would just be staring absentmindedly at the Pulse as it ran. Bits and scraps of sentences all meshed together and constantly flowing, your eyes just sort of naturally run across it and you try to string together the underlying meaning of whatever is feeding into it. After some discussions about the game with a friend, I got the idea to make an arcade-y simple little game that was all about these lines of text and finding things in them. So, naturally, I stayed up through the night and after about eight hours I had put together Babblyte, a little typing game where I learned a few things about FPS, audio transitions, and apparently did not spend enough time polishing the high score database inputs before publishing.

Anyways, this new IF game I'm working on is called Moonwell.