Dev Log 3 – Crop and Claw

Invest in Debug Menus

It’s easy to get caught up in putting the game itself together, but the moment something’s playable-ish, getting a menu of some kind for in-game debugging is pretty nice to have. I ended up adding debug menus, which also necessitated adding a few extra things to the current menus.

For starters, menus have pages now. A menu maxes at ten entries typically, so I needed a paging system for menus. This particularly relates to the fact debug menus contain every database entry for a given thing in the game. Every item and technique can be given to the player immediately. Every zone can be teleported to. Every enemy can immediately be called to fight at will. I am not limiting everything to the menu’s constraints. I did manage to implement the paging with minimal code change, but it did have some annoying edge cases. At least one thing is still broken with paging, but currently it shouldn’t affect a normal player. This may also matter if inventory is expanded into more than one page, either through an in-game upgrade or unlocking the inventory size to handle Archipelago sometime.

Equip Command

The Gear equip command works. Better time than ever with Gear debug menu allowing to be added to the inventory. It properly equips to the matching slot, and the item that was there (if any) is properly added back to the inventory.

Talk-and-Check

Since not everyone will realize the merits of talk and check, should they only have played RPGs with the interaction button being a single act, a small encounter was designed to tutorialize it. This stuff will probably be explained in the manual, but no one reads the manual.

Warps

Currently, target coordinates for a zone are set by the warp that the player triggers. This resembles something like RPG Maker’s warp system. It’ll probably be changed to something resembling a lot of old RPGs, where instead the warp trigger has a destination map and a destination id. This would be more visual for editing than the current system, and be easier to catch warps that are incorrect after a map has been changed.

Misc.

There is another project which has not been formally announced yet. I intend to when there’s something to show, just for very early marketing circulation. But I had gone back to that project at one point to properly upgrade it from Godot 4.1 to Godot 4.2, as there are features worth the pains of upgrading. In due time, I may write some stuff for that.