Pre-Alpha 2 work, and making this blog!

To start with this new year, I continued working on the pre-alpha 2 version to get it closer to release. And I also made this blog. Hello!

Most of the work I'm doing in preparation of the pre-alpha 2 release is technical: using events in more and more places, cleaning up some 'hardcoded' systems, turning the "bad end" levels into actual maps that can easily be edited. There's not much to show for this part, unfortunately, but it's going along well.

One thing I did add, on December 31st, 2024, was a bunch of new icons to be used in the game UI. I also moved the minimap to the other corner of the screen, which did fit nicely with the rest of the UI.

I implemented a door lock/unlock system on January 2nd, that can be controlled through events - including using custom animations for when the door is actually locked.

And that's including animations for when the character is tied.

Then, on January 3rd, I decided to move the content that I originally posted on Discord directly to a blog post. This is somewhat inspired by the POSSE (Publish your Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere) movement, of course - it's hard to show people "here's what I'm working on" when all I'm linking to is a private Discord server. But I also really like the idea of a place where you can find all of the project's history at once too!

This blog is all written with custom code, and I might do a technical article about it down the line. Speaking of which, technical articles are also one big reason why I wanted a blog - I created quite a few cool pieces of technology for this project, and I wanted to talk about them in more detail. I've already made three technical and semi-technical articles, and marked them as such (the "Working collisions!" article as a short overview, the "Multiplayer prototype" article as a semi-technical explanation of the Discord OAuth system, and the "Creating a custom test suite" article article as an in-depth explanation of the implementation of a custom test runner). And I have two other technical articles coming up (one on the events manager, and one on the navmesh system), and I'm happy to be able to write about all of the cool implementation details for these!

My main focus for the upcoming week / two weeks is going to be on finishing the maps for pre-alpha 2 and polishing the project prior to the proper release. My goal currently is to have four maps: one "tutorial" map with some storytelling, one "hub" map that is accessible once the tutorial is over, the "dark mage dungeon" map which is a cleaned up version of the current chest growth bad-end, and the "bandit camps" map with the leashed walk bad end. Each map should have a short "objective", and I hope I can make it interesting to play!