Developer diary entry #3

These were quite long two and a half weeks. It feel like i have done a lot.
Exactly as planned, i accomplished what i set out to do in the last diary entry. A rare occurrence.

"Passage of Time" mechanics are integrated into the game. Time is advanced manually by "Resting", or "Waiting". I deliberately shall not implement the actual passage of time, be it in real time, or accelerated game time. In other words, time will stand frozen, as is standard for point-and-click puzzle-adventures.

Each location now sets geographic coordinates and timezone, allowing all three kinds of clocks to be calculated dynamically. Even beyond that, system can handle situations where time is unknown or inapplicable as concept!

The triple clock is powered by solar calculator i have been building since last devlog. These calculations ensure somewhat realistic solar cycle day length across seasons - i checked it against Stellarium, there indeed are discrepancies within a minute, mostly because i assume apparent solar time to have uniform rate.
I mean, one can only hope to someday have enough content for this kind of clock to matter, or at least keep time as far as throughout winter of 2001.

Weather is the next target. I settled for Markov chain algorithm after all. It is a tiny bit more complicated than solar calculator, but true bottleneck will come later.
You see, the biggest time sink for me is, and always was, asset creation. All this timekeeping, weather simulating and general coding stuff is something i may procrastinate on, or try to reinvent all sorts of wheels, but still, these are thing i am confident with. Drawing though, not as much, not even after many months. Despite the fact that objectively i spent less time drawing these additional balcony views, in comparison to inventing inner logic of time systems, psychologically it felt no less than thrice more draining.

Anyways, i clearly cannot keep on drawing day/night/twilight variations for every current and future location in the game, i will need to generalise it hard, especially if i want to add weather simulation.
And, unfortunately, release of promised intermediate build will be postponed, but likely not for too long.

Video below demonstrates time mechanic in its current state. By the way, go and subscribe to that channel, as all current and archive videologs, original music and other funny bullshit will be uploaded there.