Devlog - 05 July 2025 to 18 July 2025

Was originally going to do a video for this in preparation for my planned update but there have been big changes that I want to put more work into. Still plan to put something up between now and the next Devlog so if you are interested in updates, please subscribe to my YouTube channel (YouTube Link) or drop a comment and will arrange a stream.

Outside that, let's see how things are going.

PROGRESS SINCE LAST DEVLOG (5 JUL - 18 JUL)

The goals set from my last update are as below:

1) Transition from Campaign to Battle seamlessly (carried forward)

2) Code up Items (carried forward)

3) Boss Battle enablement

Progress over the last two weeks has been very good and, whilst there are still odd bugs and visual improvements to make, things are working.

Firstly, if anyone missed my comment on the last Devlog, the headache of the Battle/Duel Scene not pulling information was, as expected, a fairly simple issue I was missing.  The transitioning between Campaign and Duel is working with appropriate rewards for winning. This is seemless from what I can tell but the only real way to know is to play the game. This will be the core aim during the next 2 weeks - play, find bug, fix. But for the context of the testing I have done, this is working. Even more so, whilst I coded the save Campaign, I never plugged it in; this has now been added and the Campaign saves/loads correctly.

The code for the items is pretty much in place. I say "pretty much" as the concept is there but a few checks need to be done. Whilst coding this I made some changes to the Card Game code which led me to learning about Bitmasks which is an efficient method when you simply have known bools. A way to think of them is having a house with 32 rooms - a bool only occupies 1 room so you have around 31 rooms unoccupied. Using bitmasks I can fill those rooms rather than take more memory. But ultimately to get items working efficiently within my code, I've had to think carefully - after all I want items to be powerful but I can't hardcode 100's of rules into my system; nor do I need to if I'm planning ahead and doing it right now. So for all intensive purposes, this is done for testing which was the goal as I couldn't test an item without the rest working but there will be more work to be done depending on how the tests play out.

The first Boss is set up and spawns into the Campaign. Again, I plan to do some small tweeks here but you can go to the Boss and the battle will start correctly.

On top of the above, I've also made a big design change which was to turn my game from a portait design to landscape. This gives a much higher ceiling for intuiative design that I think will help the end product, even though it has made the Duel Scene look like a mess - attached an image to give an idea on changes but it is a very early example and I ultimately want to reduce UI elements where possible. I want a basic version working for the next update planned in 2 weeks but it will be a very premature version overall, enough for the Duel to run but very likely will be messy.

Finally, I've added some background music to the game.

All in all, it's a little bit of "pros and cons". Some changes were larger changes not planned but aimed to help guide me later. Other changes were planned with further work technically needed though minimal requirements are met.

NEXT STEPS

Over the next 2 weeks, my main focuses are going to be:

1) Audio additions and customisation via Options

2) Testing, finding bugs and fixing

3) Further layout improvements (where possible and required)

These were targets I hoped to be working on for these next 2 weeks. Ultimately my goal is to make it functional - it won't be "pretty" or bug-free which is fine but it should give people a basic feel.

It's still unclear if I will make my goal to update end of July 2025 - realistically with the shift from Portrait to Landscape I've made it so the earliest date would be 2nd August 2025 so it will either be a Devlog saying it's up or a Devlog saying give me a few more weeks. I am confident enough to say that it WILL be updated by 16 August 2025 at the latest though - hopefully I won't be eating my words in 4 weeks time.

Outside of this, I also want to do some videos comparing the old and new design, or if there is interest, do a live stream going over the changes and any other questions people have. Please leave a comment if you are interested and I will do a post with a date otherwise I will just do a video.

RETROSPECTIVE - What went well / Could have gone better?

I believe it has gone pretty well over the last 2 weeks - it's amazing how much more I can do with a day or two free being able to focus on my game. Once again, I'm back from leave so this may cause me to miss the mark but I'm optimistic about finding and fixing bugs - which likely means I'm going to be banging my head against the wall very soon.

Whilst I imagine I could have made better progress, it wasn't bad and I've been improving my knowledge which hopefully should help when refactoring code and making changes. There is still a lot to do but I am getting more and more confident the tools - specifically code developed more recently - are in the right direction to create dynamic, powerful and efficient code (it's probably still trash to an experienced coder/dev but improving each time).

For now, I will keep working as I am - the audio, testing bugs and layout have nice wide range where I can just focus on small areas and get them right.

Anyway; not much else to say.

Take care,

PatBard07 

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