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It's the "PDA update" update...
🕑 Added 2022-12-04 15:01:25 +0000 UTCHello!
A fairly short update post this time around (well, for me at least).
It's just a jump to the left...
Firstly, my apologies for not being around on the old social media gubbins of late. I've been absent from Discord, the forum, Twitter - the works. Partly due to coming down with a stinking cold at the start of the month (and God alone knows where I got that from)* but mainly as I've had my head down coding like fury otherwise.
There's a lot to get done and I'm aware that I can end up spending a lot of time chatting away on Discord, the forum etc as opposed to working if I'm not careful. Plus, complex coding doesn't really lend itself to taking the eye off the ball. Animating and rendering is a different story, of course, and gives me a bit more flexibility in being more present but coding....I need to focus to get that right. So, my apologies, but I trust you'll understand.
Speaking of coding it might just be worth a quick (promise!) recap.
And then a step to the right...
So, accident in April, Patreon turned off whilst I recovered (and still off to this day...eek!) and too much time to think while I got better - which made me realise the PDA and it's functions was a bit grotty, not really fit for purpose and didn't really help you play the game.
Recovered and set to to rectify this; created a massively overdesigned and unstable replacement and, bit the bullet, and started over again (see my last big post at the end of October)
So much for the history lesson. How is it going?
Put your hands on your hips...
Shockingly....it's going pretty well. In doing the Mk 3 PDA I wanted to keep the stability of the Mk 1, yet bring in some the prettier interface and some of the features of the the Mk 2 and I seem to have got the balance right. Is it perfect? Probably not. But it is more useful, nicer to look at and, in any case, is much better than what you've had before. So I'm going to call that a win. (It also doesn't fall on it's arse every five minutes like the Mk 2...).
Of course, with it being me, there was the odd false start. What my Dad would have called being "too clever by half"**
You bring your knees in tight...
In an attempt to knock your socks off, I had initially gone to town a bit with the PDA screen calling. Clicking on any function didn't just call a screen, it slid the screen out from the side of the PDA. Selecting an item then slid a further screen out from that and the text nicely dissolved onto the sub screen. Finish with the sub screen and it all nicely reversed back. All with sound effects too! It looked great. It looked slick. It looked professional and polished as hell.***
It also rendered the PDA utterly unusable.
Not because of coding or stability issues just I didn't really think this one through enough from a usability perspective.
Imagine, there you are having just got an update on a character. So off you go to the PDA and check it out. You sit there impressed as the PDA does its little performance and then decide you want to just check your orders again. You sit watching the character screens reverse out and then sit still longer as you watch the orders screens now perfom their little dance. God help you if you wanted to change the music as well, you might as well go and put the kettle on for a cup of tea while you waited....
But it's the pelvic thrust...
So clever. But not smart, and certainly not very player friendly ( I reverted back to simple screen calling in the end). On the other hand it did prompt me to think a bit more about what else could I do to make the PDA more player friendly.
It turned out quite a bit. For example, if any of the sub screens get updated, orders for example or character information, there's now a little "New!" flag that appears on that sub screen menu that stays there until you've clicked on it so you can see at a glance what's been updated that you haven't yet looked over. It also means you don't have to check things out as they get updated straight away but can look them over at your leisure knowing you won't have missed anything.
I also had an eye on such things as making it less of a chore to use, so (and with a bit of rather clever coding) you no longer have to click any form of close button on the sub screens but can just roll over to the PDA where it will close it for you,**** and to have a reminder pop up alongside the PDA for what each button is when you hover over it.
All little things, I know (and there's a few more too) but they just make your experience a little bit more pleasant and allow you to enjoy the game as opposed to wrestling with the interface.
There's a screen capture video of it in action at the start of the chapter below to give you an idea of how it performs.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d9j6AlKKtxQ
Let's do the Time Warp again!
So to sum up, I'm working hard on this for you and I really think you'll get a lot of benefit out of this especially as we move forward with the game.
Patreon, of course, will remain off for charging until I've completed this work and am ready to release Chapter Five. I've said before that this was a design mistake on my part, and that I don't believe you should pay for my mistakes.
And that's about it for now.
Stay (or be) lucky.
Notty.
* Studiously avoids the gaze of anyone who follows her Twitter feed at this point...
** Sometimes it seems, "Dad advice" is worth holding on to...
*** Anyone who's coded in Renpy will appreciate just how tricky this was to do using screen handling. In short, very. Oh, well...
**** This was a bit trickier than you'd think as I had to account for you moving over the PDA if you'd opened up a menu selection from the left hand side of the PDA. If you did, of course you'd have to move over the rest of the PDA to get to your sub screen. Took me a while to work out how to keep the screens open for that instance and yet still close if you'd finished looking at them and rolled back.
Comments
Valerio De Ambroggi
Good evening from Italy! The game is getting better and better, as far as I can see from youtube. Personally I would add the "age" in the npc info. What do you think?
