Nameless Dev Log

Messing with UI "Themes"

5/21/2024

An hour or two last week
Dug into the theme system used for Godot's UI. In particular using the preset options within the dialogue manager add-on. Changing the colors of text, panels, buttons, and moving around the player choice options slightly. I expect this to require a lot of iteration eventually. Partially because I don't want the entire thing to be this brown. Though also just because 90% of the interactions will be dialogue and text choices so it will need to feel natural and unobtrusive to read and click through. Especially if / when I end up writing too much text for each option.

Added Walls & Doors

5/14/2024

3 hours or so
Added some basic wall sprites to show the intended perspective and then used my Interactable and Talkable components on a new door object so it'd detect and show feedback when interactable. Then just called for a level transition instead of starting a dialogue. Also LeVeL dEsIgN. Added an interior level with a blue NPC, who doesnt enjoy being intruded on.

Walls and New NPC

5/13/2024

Like 30 minutes yesterday
Added some fast, dirty, and ugly walls just to see that I could. Simply sprite and wall collision. Plus added another NPC to the scene and changed my dynamic variables of the label text and modulate color PLUS added a new dialogue file - all to effectively show I could do so quickly and easily. Which I could thankfully :D

Added NPC Icon Feedback

5/13/2024

An hour or two this past Saturday
Moved feedback icon display to NPCs instead of player. Plus added logic to move between a ! indicating new dialogue and an "..." indicating being within dialogue distance.

Interaction Icon and Dialogue Bug Fix

5/13/2024

Several hours sometime last week
Interaction Icon was simple to add since I already had the interaction detection. Bug fix was a pain considering the dialogue system is an add on and has a LOT of complex systems to function. Thank god the creator has a YouTube channel with a variety of update videos. One of which mentioned his use of _unhandled_input. Which fixed my bug of spacebar beginning new dialogues each time I wanted it to advance the current one.

Text Edited Dialogue

2/26/2024

1 Hour on and off
Learned to reference, set, and present a global string variable in the dialogue. Plus a basic if statement and cycling dialogue until exited.

Circle Character Assets

2/23/2024

30 Minutes
Made some circle assets to be recolored by code and stand in as different characters.

Dialogue Plugin

2/22/2024

1.5-2.5 Hours - a lot of on and off and friend chatting distraction
Chose which dialogue plugin to use for this project (at least for now), installed, and started following the basics via video tutorial for it. Got about halfway through - starting the test with player input and setting up a basic player x npc collision.

Movement

2/21/2024

1 hour
Followed a basic tutorial I've had in my Godot playlist for a while to set up a smooth, real time, WASD movement for the player character.

Reorienting with Tutorials

2/20/2024

Several hours on and off because distractions
Opened a new project with the expectation of looking up some project structuring advice from YouTube tutorials (since I had a few small issues with that during the game jam) and ended up falling down a rabbit hole of tons of different Godot tutorials again. Partially scene hierarchy and file organization structure, but also some dialogue systems and plugins that I may or may not end up using, depending on if I'll be able to grok onto them well enough.
I did learn about Autoloading a Global script with global variables so that should be pretty useful - especially I imagine for eventual saving and loading and a large priority for this project being branching paths.
Ideally next time I'll actually do something in-engine though lol, at least some basic movement.