Developer diary entry #2

Frontend work is exceptionally thankless. In Godot, one feels it quite acutely, as its UI tools were made by engineer for engineers. Then again, perhaps i am to blame for choosing to simulate a good set of applications for the kind of gameplay i envision. But alas, i never much liked working on frontend.

Nevertheless, progress has been made. Attached image shows the browser as of this moment.
Funny how i am now, essentially, building websites. This thing already has a rudimentary architecture that half-resembles actual webapps, if you squint. I have to implement simple URL routing engine to navigate these websites, while building UI in Godot is somewhat similar to working with flex containers. Thanks heavens i am not required to build responsive layouts or manage any CRUD calls.

Along the way i finally tracked down the cause of a particularly bizarre bug involving animations breaking, but only in even sets of things. Turns out, it has to do with certain things being addressed by reference. In fact, this bug makes so much sense now, that i am even more baffled as to how to fix it.

Ah, yes, the website - Agora Forums. It is the beautiful /x/ board of this universe. I already cannot wait to populate it with conspiracy threads and paranormal troll pastas. This website, together with messenger app (from previous devlog), i bet, is already enough to carry several visual novels' worth of content. I could only promise to try and properly include all that simulated /x/-posting into storyline and gameplay. Also, i shall not tell you how long it took me to draw this frontpage banner (a bit longer than your first guess).
By the way, i think there is a forum called "Agora", which exists in real life. I do not really care enough whether it does or does not. "Any resemblance is purely coincidental" or what was it, i really like the name, though.

On other development fronts we have a work-in-progress weather simulation. Weather conditions will be generated with hourly resolution. It really is not that difficult to generate monthly weather time series that represent reality in somewhat believable way; in contrast, coding all that post-processing and drawing variations of background sprites for all the time of day and weather combinations will take way more time than refining the simulation. But we are talking "naturally generating rainy nights" - if i may be so bold, i might say that i have hopes for this system.And i also must not forget to calculate sunrise and sunset times for differing daylight hours across the year. I may even throw in moon phase tracking some day down the line. Turns out, my background in amateur astronomy does come in handy every once in a blue moon.

For now, I shall take a small break from these applications and finally implement the passage of time. I may even upload intermediary version when that is complete.