Time for another update, although it’s not a very eventful one. My focus has been 100% on completing the Tournament portion of the game. Both the City and World Tournament happens in the Coliseum. (as seen above)

I’ve set up most of the battles (they still need testing) and I’ve completed the UI for the Coliseum, but I’m still working on the dialogue (there’s a small bit spread throughout) and I still need to create all the scripts so everything works in game. I wasn’t able to complete it all in one week as I’d hope but I believe I’ll be done in the next week so that’s good news.

Once I’m complete with the Tournament stuff, I’m going to shift my focus to the remaining holidays. Originally they were going to be filled with dialogue but I don’t have time for that, so I’ve thought up another idea. It will basically be a series of options that will reward you (or do something else) based on your choices. I’m simply going to keep the dialogue to a minimal with the remaining content of the game.

Even with me reducing the density of the dialogue, it’s still going to be a lot of dialogue since these holiday events happen multiple times throughout the game. I will build up a reusable system and place a limit to the amount of dialogue I will use. Hopefully that will be enough in preventing me from spending too much time on this portion of the game.

Once the holidays are complete I will begin properly play testing the game. There are still a few things I need to go over but I really need to start play testing soon. This game needs to be “playable” from start to finish, more than anything. It also needs to be tested for balance. I haven’t revisited this aspect of the game since I first play tested year 1 way back when.

Finally, I need to kill the bugs. I know they’re there. They are hiding in places I don’t even know to look unless I stumble upon it by accident. For example, just recently I was fixing a small bug I’ve ignored for months since it was so low priority. I was also testing some new items I added to the game, (yes, I know, I shouldn’t be adding even more stuff this late in the game but I can’t help myself) when all of a sudden the daughter was able to move off the grid path during exploration.

HUH?!?! How?!?!!!? I thought to myself.

This was really strange, I was certain my programming of this part of the game was solid. It was some of the oldest and most worked on scripts and yet now it was malfunctioning! I immediately stopped what I was working on and began what became hours of trouble shooting. Well, long story short, it was due to an issue of alignment. When I was manually changing the position of the character on the grid using the teleport event, the position became slightly off. (we’re talking 50.50 -> 50.00, yeah, just that “off”)

This change was enough to throw the system off balance but it only happened at a specific location and I wouldn’t have even noticed if I hadn’t decided to casually test items in the first map. Wow, just fucking wow……

I corrected the problem and put in a fail safe just encase some other script later in the game creates the same problem. Guys, this bug has existed since I first started making the game and I just fount out about it. I hope you’re starting to understand why I want to get to game testing so bad. There’s no telling what other type of wacky bugs are waiting for me. 😭

Okay, that’s all for this week. I’ll speak with you guys again in the next update.