Today’s deck is the Anime Food Tarot.
It is REALLY good. Though I’d say the name is misleading in the sense that only the court cards have characters so you could say it’s just “food tarot” and it’d be roughly the same.
Today’s reading is… basically advising to not get too carried away with all the excitement I’ve had with going back to coding. Advising to pace myself.
Speaking of which, if you’re to ever take any piece of advice on Game Development from me, make it this one: Don’t There’s no such thing as a “simple task”.
This is a reality that applies to any field, but in programming-adjacent stuff especially, since everything depends on everything else, something as simple as adding an icon might require days.
In today’s case, however, it’s born out of the learning process, but the point stands.
Today’s task was to figure out how transitioning between screens/rooms worked. In engines like Game Maker Studio I was used to just telling it to jump to a specific room, but here the process is a bit more involved.
You gotta create a room, then declare it in a script, load it (or pre-load it) and tell the engine to change to that one.
Compared to GMS, it’s basically making you do the resource management out of the gate instead of automating most of it engine-side and making you give it the exceptions.
While this is slightly annoying, that level of control does have its benefits nonetheless, it gives you more control over what’s loaded when and more importantly makes you think about what’s loaded when instead of spending most of development without thinking about that and then finding out in QA that you were supposed to think about it.
Not like I’d know how that is, no sir.
But the point remains, what I assumed was a single, simple task, quickly devolved into learning a bunch of extra principles of the engine. I thought I’d have two tasks done, but after all the effort I figured I did my quota and moved onto other things.
I mean there was a lot of back-and-forth with the characters and the designs, but I mean on my side of things.
This is what the development checklist looks like by the end of today by the way.
Tomorrow’s task will be to make a commands menu that vanishes to one side.
Here’s my general idea for how that’s gonna be. It might change later, but it’s the current plan.
The aspect ratio will be 16:9 and there will be a thing where the player characters will always be left facing right and the NPCs will always be on the right facing left.
The commands menu (the one that houses things like “Move” “Look” “Talk” “Settings” and so on) covers the right half of the screen.
So let’s say you select “Talk” and choose “White Woman”.
The menu slides to one side and it reveals White Woman.
The conversation ends and the menu slides back in.
Then you decide to talk with White Man instead.
The menu slides to one side again but this time White Man was underneath.
Simple to understand. I’m trying to make Everyone’s Detective carry the spirit of a Nintendo DS game. Not necessarily in a more direct way (that would involve a lot of uncomfortably zoomed in character portraits for example), but I want it to have the same vibe as one, and things sliding from one screen to the next is one such way.
Sadly we don’t have two screens, but the spirit of it remains.
But that’s all for tomorrow. How was my day beyond that?
Well, did you know that Salchichón has milk?
So for those not aware, Salchichón is… basically Spanish-style Salami. The meat is a bit looser amongst other detail and as it turns out they mix in powdered milk in to the sausage.
I found this out because I bought a small tray at the supermarket, I was like “well damn, it’s been years since I’ve had it”.
First bite, slight tingling on my tongue but sometimes fried food gives me that so whatever.
I eat the whole sandwhich and next thing I know I’m coughing and feeling like I’ve got phlegm that just wont leave and realize wait a second…
And that’s where I google things and oh would you look at that Salchichón has lactose.
I also moved a bunch of stuff to storage and finally paid those bills I didn’t pay yesterday. But otherwise the day was thankfully uneventful.