Developer diary entry #7

The Grand Refactoring is almost complete... at least in coding part of things. I am confident that in next diary entry i will be writing something about weather system, new locations, or even new plot developments.

There is a certain ease with which one can refine existing things. Not to say it is easy, and not to say it is useless either, but the task is well-defined - fix legacy bullshit. Here are 30 locations, bring them up to a new template, fix nasty long-standing bugs and design problems along the way. This certainty is dangerous, as you can forget about creating something new.

So, i greatly reduced boilerplate and ensured nice intellisense for remaining necessary one by autoloading references and making many scripts to be custom classes. I am not sure how to best use that power, clearly i cannot make every little thing its own class? Or can i?
I uprooted bunch of blind upwards get_node calls, stuff communicates around so much better now. Not all turned out to be replaceable with signals - they do look stupid at times and concentrate code in certain central scripts, but benefits so far majorly outweigh the trouble, as now i can at least see what i am calling from location subroot. Moving stuff around will still break shit, but a lot less this than before.
I standardised menu system, and instantiating systems in general, no more dedicated shenanigans to open each and every menu screen out there.
I rearranges shader logic, now it should be much easier to utilise those additive-sprites-as-lights.
I created templated for locations, which hopefully will make it easier to create new ones, but you know, since there is nothing remotely interesting about that "new template for locations", let me now tell you about current situation in the story department.

I am quite sad about the fact that i have not produced much content-wise since that patch in March in which i added Maxwell mansion.
Partly because i still do not have story and quest flow planned to comfortable degree. I do not wish to stumble like i did with the prologue. It is a good trial run, the prologue, but would have been a terrible state to set things in stone.
Another reason i put story away was sheer amount of technical stuff to work through first. I refused to do story stuff before i at least had time system going. Which now i do, but few incomplete essential tablet apps are still yet to be implemented, as well as few more locations.

But at least my choice to rely on real-world calendar makes tracking timelines exceptionally easy. In fact, i found that the best way to plan the story is by using actual normal calendar... maybe not google calendar or similar shit. I found a certain "Fantasy Calendar", seems perfect for my needs. Found it long time ago, actually. Maybe it is time i put it to work.

I already have a nice kanban board in which i write down story ideas and sort them by... some criteria, it is vibe-sorted, it is definitely not enterprise task board kanban you lmao. This one was a decent upgrade over just keeping random notes around.

Another thing i am thinking about is a way to use Gitlab issue and task trackers for worldbuilding and story planning. Sound crazy stupid, right? As i said, only "thinking", could be more trouble than use.

Meanwhile, i was doing something on the side - uploading music to archive channel. So let me run some self-promo here.
Some comments, which i attach to every music video, are related to the game. There are few cool stories i never had an opportunity to tell in these posts.  

The channel is this: https://www.youtube.com/@prikol-kot

And here are collections in which i organised my music:
- Selected Early Works (2022)
- Modern Adventure (2022)
- Schizoid Man vol. 1 (2023)
- Music from Dreams (2023)
- Schizoid Man vol. 2 (~2024)

More recent stuff along with majority of BGMs from the game i will upload shortly, as soon as i finish cover art.