It’s that time again, and boy am I excited. You know the deal, I am currently in the process of porting Guardian’s Guide to a new framework. And this past week has been a real joy. If you want to get caught up with the porting process click here for the entire timeline.

I set two goals for myself this past week. Port the exploration mechanics and port the battle system. I was confident I would get the exploration ported considering I didn’t have to change much but switching the controls over to the new framework. But I was convinced I would only get through part of the battle system since I not only needed to recreate a bunch of menus but I also needed to recreate some thick custom scripts.

This week has been unbelievably productive. I not only ported the exploration mechanics, I redesigned the menu to display more information and work better with keyboard/controller. You can see the old design here.

This was exciting enough considering everything worked great once I started testing the controls. By mid week I started working on porting the battle system. Since this was more or less where I left off before the port it’s still in a skeleton state so I don’t have any flashy screen shots to show you but the bare mechanics are there and they needed porting.

Not only did I port all those mechanics, not only did I redesign some menus to better support keyboard/controllers, not only did I port the beefy scripts AND make the code function better, but I also fixed a few problems that were plaguing me for weeks. WOW!!

Unfortunately, I ran into a few bugs, nothing game stopping, but bugs nonetheless that need fixin’. Despite that, the exploration and battle work 100% from start to finish. This is fantastic news for a beta framework.

I can officially say I am about 80% done with the port and all the questionable features are done and accounted for. All I really have left to do is porting a few more menus (like the guild hall) along with the dialogue and gameflow. I’m a little hesitant about porting the dialogue since there is already a lot of it and I know for a fact I will need to re-port menu listings in the framework. (there is a plan to redesign how menus are handled behind the scenes to provide more flexibility) This won’t require me to recreate the menus but I will have to go back and reference every menu again in all the scripts I created. This will already be a grueling task but having 50-100 additional dialogues to click through will make it that much more dreadful. I don’t know, I’ll probably do it anyways just to make sure everything works 100%.

Hey check this out, this is how the exploration will control! You can also use the keyboard WASD to navigate!

For next week I’ll just keep moving forward. I’ll port the guild hall and then port the main menu. From there I’ll start porting the introduction then we’ll be back were we started. All I can do is deal with the circumstance as they unfold but I’m confident I’m through the worst of it at this point. (famous last words lol)

Until next week, stay well friends!