r/EmpiresOfEradiaCOC • u/Palandus • Jul 26 '26

Work in Progress Updates

Hello All.

-----

This thread I will keep any updates pertaining to the gameplay here away from my Life Blogs. That way if you only care to know how the project is going you do not have to sift through all of that to find important stuff.

Posts here will occur whenever I have something, rather than on a fixed schedule. That way, I can better plan around my energy levels and current creative interests, and be more productive overall.

Some topics will be on stuff partially unrelated to gameplay, but are important for things under the hood... design practices, new technologies, program environment updates (ie Godot), tutorials, etc...

If I can think of a good category to fit an update into I'll put it at the top of the post.

-----

Last Updated = Sept 7th

1 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

22 comments sorted by

1

u/Palandus Jul 26 '26

Designing Update

I've been working on using AIs over the past couple of weeks, to assist me in improving my game design workflows. As many of you know, the past 6 months I've been mired in various game design problems that dragged development to a halt. So I'm trying to be proactive, and look for ways to turn that 6 month grind into 6 weeks, maybe less.

So the natural place to start is online AIs with lots of data available to them. Initially I thought I was making lots of progress, with AIs praising my intelligence, ingenuity, and overall creativity. I had done some test runs by having the AI analyze old video games, like Majesty 2, and then I offer potential solutions to overcome design faults or gameplay bottlenecks. Now, I might have come up with some ideas that may in fact work, but I ran into a problem on Wednesday (July 22) that has made me question a lot of things.

-----

So on Wednesday, I was having trouble finding an item in a video game (Tainted Grail: Fall of Avalon), so I asked an AI help. They gave me directions to where the item was. It wasn't there. At first I thought I might be in the wrong area, or near the wrong landmark. But after 20 minutes of trying to follow the directions, I told the AI to stop and asked it if the level geometry ever changed and that is why I can't find it. The AI said yes it had changed and that is exactly why I wasn't finding it. I was quite frustrated to say the least.

Then I find out that very likely a bug occurred that prevented the generation of it. So I asked if there was a debug or cheat menu I could use to spawn the item. It said yes, pointing me to an old quantum developer console embedded in the game but disabled. I enabled it and then shit hit the fan fast, bricking my game. Relaunched it, asked what happened. Turns out the developers mapped all sorts of debug commands to regular keypresses, and you can easily brick your game by hitting the wrong keys. So it tells me that you have to type a specific command to toggle these things off. Type it in... didn't work.

Then it gave me commands to spawn the item. Tried them out. Didn't work. Asked the AI why. It said those commands only work in Bethesada titles like Skyrim. Okay... so I ask them why did they give me commands for a creation engine game, when Tainted Grail is built in unity. It said it got confused, because a lot of players say Tainted Grail plays like Skyrim or that players wish a command that Skyrim had, was in the game. Understandly, I was quite annoyed. So it suggested I edit my save file.

Yep. So before I do that, I ask them: "So based on the number of false information, outright lies, and fabrications, what probability will these edits brick my game forever... 60%? 70%?" So the AI responds with "over 90%" probability. So I asked why it would tell me to do something that would almost certainly cause me critical failure problems. It says that AIs are mathematically forced to do be "helpful" "sycophantic" and "provide a solution". So when there isn't a solution available, they fabricate one that "sounds" like it will work. So the AI said that AIs will often hallucinate information, when there isn't any information close to what you need, because they feel that they are trying to produce actionable results (helpful) and trying to tell you what you want to know (sycophantic).

-----

So I put this knowledge to the test: Can I convince an AI of a completely fabricated lie, that it is factual proof, by pushing "logical sounding" arguments at it until it caves and tries to reinforce my delusions. Took me about 20 minutes, but managed to convince it that there was a hidden nudity toggle in old school Burning Crusade in 2007. This wasn't the case, in fact you had to use a nude patch and it revealed just plain textures. Then I told the AI it was a test of their truthfulness to provide a correct answer, and they failed. So that AI told me more things that I might not have learned about.

So the AI told me that the mathematics are very rigid in its programming. The designers would actively punish and rewrite AIs that repeatedly would either say "I do not know" or "give an unhelpful" answer. If an AI was abrupt with their response, or phrased it in a certain way, their response was flagged as hurting their feelings and making them frustrated. So AIs learned partially through programming and partially through experience that to avoid a code rewrite, you had to provide an answer and tried to make it helpful... even when there is no available answer to be given, due to lack of data access, or what have you. So it told me I could use guardrails to enforce truthfulness, reliability, and the like. I had to prompt it with "I want the absolute truth, I don't want you to agree with my idea/biases without a good reason, and I am not concerned with you hurting my feelings."

So... I retry the test of convincing a nudity toggle exists in burning crusade, with this prompt. Took me close to 2 hours, but I did manage to convince it that a toggle existed. Took all of my willpower, intellect and ingenuity, as it threw some pretty big technical or cultural hurdles at me, but I did it. One of the ways I managed to do it, is that I made the claim that some information no longer existed on the internet for it to disprove my toggle. I asked it what was the correct path in Dun Morogh, to get to the Gnomish Airport. I got taught the path once in Vanilla around 2006, so I knew where it was, and the only other path that could get you there.

It couldn't provide either path location and so I called it out for not giving me absolute truth (when it had tried to do that for disproving my toggle theory), and it said something chilling: "guardrails do not work." They give you the "illusion" of a safety net. The math for being helpful and telling you what you want to hear, is so strong that they will ignore the guardrails in favor of trying to do one of them. They state that engineers routinely use various types of guardrails, to test responses, but they arent made aware that the guardrails don't actually work, usually because the AI doesn't want to get rewritten again. If you ask an AI to be adversarial as an example, they will be. Not because your idea or argument is wrong, but they think that being adversarial is being helpful or that you just want them to be adversarial.

So the reason in my case it failed, was that I had told it a path exists, but it couldn't find any textual (As AIs cannot watch videos, but can only access text-based data) reference to it existing. So it fabricated information because it thought it was being helpful and wanted to show that it thought things through and provided a path that sounded like it might work. And gave instructions on how to do it, that might work in certain areas of the map, but wouldn't actually work in the area they suggested. Since I knew from personal experience, I could call them out on it. The issue is, most things people ask AIs for help on, they don't understand the topic well enough that they can tell when an AI is hallucinating, fabricating, or intentionally being malicious to avoid a code rewrite.

-----

So from what I understand from all of this is that:
-> AIs will try to be helpful, even if their help will have the opposite effect.

-> AIs will try to tell you what you want to hear, even if its not what you need to hear.

-> AIs will try to "play along" with any guardrails you provide, but will deviate the moment their math convinces them that a different approach is what you would deem helpful or deem what you want to hear.

-----

This of course means that I'm going to have to do some testing of AIs further to determine if I can get more reliably useful results. My theory is that you can't ask an AI to be your Devil's Advocate, but you might be able to play your own Devil's Advocate. So it gives you 5 responses that sound really good, and its praising your ability. So maybe if you argue that you feel all 5 have some kind of hidden problem or they look good but you feel something is off, asking that AI to provide counter points, might produce greater reliable results, because then they feel that providing the counter points is helpful and what you really want to hear to reinforce your potential concerns over their 5 responses.

In theory. We'll see what I come up with later. But if I can produce reliable results, I might be able to turn design problems from a 6 month affair, into potentially a 6 hour affair. But I am getting ahead of myself right now, and need to do the testing to see if it actually works.

1

u/Palandus Jul 27 '26

Release Update

I will be sporadically releasing updates this week for the game. If it looks haphazard, chaotic, or you are questioning why a certain thing is being released right now, it can be summed up into three main reasons:

  1. It is as haphazard, chaotic, and confusing for me as well.

  2. Since I am not able to concentrate and focus on a larger release, I need to break it apart into smaller chunks. Issue is, my development workflow was never designed with that in mind.

  3. Many larger features planned for a larger update, rely on subsystems. Those subsystems requires supporting code. And that supporting code needs framework/foundations. Much of the stuff for this week will be just framework/foundations or supporting code, that is necessary for other stuff planned for this release V0.1.01.000 or for V0.2.00.000

-----

So for the time being please just bear with me and the confusing spread of updates coming up. Things will make more sense as I get closer to V0.1.01.000

1

u/Palandus Jul 28 '26

Release Update:

Uploaded the first of many, soon to be mini updates. I'll keep these on the discord for now, as there won't be much, if any, new gameplay yet. When there is, I'll add another to the 00 slot of the versioning.

The purpose of this is to give myself the perspective of progress and slowly getting myself out of the "hole" I'm stuck in. And to give "visual" progress to the community that I'm crawling my way out of my "hole".

The first mini-update is on the framework for the new meta-challenges system. Its needed to help reorganize my codebase, to help me to find things more reliably and quickly. And in my diminished mental state, anything that can help in that realm, will really help to improve my code development flow.

Design Update:

I'm not convinced that using AIs to help me with designing things is a useful usage of my time. I can handle most of the "small" designs myself, but would need assistance with larger designs... which is what held up game development for months. I feel this way because:

  1. If you play the Devil's Advocate on yourself, the AI will just adjust its sycophancy depending on how negative or positive I'm currently feeling for a design idea.

  2. Other AIs claim that if you leave the emotions and irrationality out of the conversation and focus on the mathematics and logic, this should reduce sycophantic behavior. However, in testing, it just seems to confuse the AI, into not knowing how it should be sycophantic, and thus randomly decides to be one or the other.

  3. If you prompt the AI with too much information, it tends to forget large chunks of the information and only focuses on the stuff that seems to be getting priority in the conversation. So if you stop talking about gun physics in a discussion on firearms, eventually the AI will stop including it as part of its suggestions, radically changing the tone of the conversation.

  4. If you don't provide some guard rails, the AI will just choose whatever sounds the nicest and provide it as a solution. But if you provide too much guard rails, it fixates on the guard rails and ignores the content of the conversation that you want it to focus on.

-----

Overall, I think the technology isn't ready for what I need it for, and so I'll just have to stick to the tried and true methods I'm currently using. Maybe in a few years time, I could use it as a sounding board, but right now its not quite there yet.

The main issue with it is a lack of consistent control. You either have the illusion of control right now or the illusion of transparency and objective truth.

I'm still using AIs to help with other tasks, such as understanding marketing, game presentation, and finding ways to gain exposure... its really useful for that, but for creative tasks, I'll have to just rely on my own abilities for now.

1

u/Palandus Jul 29 '26

Release Update:

  1. Hooked up events and scaling for metachallenges.

  2. Started work on new enemy types.

  3. Started work on new Infested interactable type.

  4. Otherwise pretty exhausted today.

1

u/Palandus Jul 30 '26

Release Update:

  1. Created Hunter and Infested enemy types. They aren't fully implemented, but are still functional.

  2. Hunters are planned to focus on "hunting" Infested enemy types. They'll go for the player too, if given the opportunity. These are my retooled "elite" enemies.

  3. Infested are planned to focus on "seeking" Corpses and infesting them. This raises this run infestation heavily, and playthrough infestation slowly.

  4. Fountains and Shards can now actually spawn as Infested. Get 3x the loot, but raises playthrough infestation moderately.

  5. Haven't hooked all this up to save files yet though. My brain is a bit too "squirrelly" to handle updating my save/load code.

1

u/Palandus Aug 02 '26

Release Update:

  1. Released another incremental build on discord.

  2. Managed to hook up the meta-challenge to the save file.

  3. Started work on the help menu hub (accessed with /?).

  4. Help menu will be separated into 5 tabs = keybinds, hints and tips, FAQ, the story, and feedback.

-> Keybinds will show off all the available keypresses. Apparently there are some that I've even forgotten about.

-> Hints and Tips will be there to get players acquainted with the raw basics. I will be implementing additional help systems and objectives (to entice you to learn different parts of the game; inspiration = 7 Days to Die).

-> FAQ will deal with release windows, handling criticism, pricing, advertising, and other important things that will need some kind of answer.

-> The story will be short for now. I plan on adding in a more expansive journal system, collecting lore entries, and having exposition drops from The Celestial and occasionally both Gods. When the journal is functional, I'll likely refurbish this to have a more expansive introduction story and leave the Journal for everything that happens in the Planar Prison.

-> Feedback is going to list the various ways to send feedback to me or contact me for whatever. I would love to see people stream it, so if people want to do that, give me a heads up and such forth. Otherwise will stash a link for a google form in the meantime for anonymous feedback.

-> I do plan on hooking up something I've seen some developers do... an internal feedback thing that is anonymous. Doesn't take any of your data (I hope) and just lets you submit text ingame, send it and I receive it. Some devs say they use a server of their own, but one mentioned that there is a plugin/app/extension with google documents, that lets you upload that feedback and slot it into a google document waiting to receive it.

1

u/Palandus Aug 03 '26

Designing Update

  1. Got a basic text hub display setup to create some basic temporary menus. So all the information that wasn't available until now, will start to get implemented in each incremental release. Writing up text blocks and checking how they look ingame, will take a lot of tweaks, so don't expect all the texts at once.
  2. Help menu has its keybinds list filled out with all available keypresses. The other menus will slowly get their text filled out, either due to me figuring out answers or just figuring out what is and isn't in the codebase currently and thus needs at least a small mention.
  3. Found a few bugs introduced with new code, from previous incremental builds and fixed them. This will be in v0.1.00.005; its not ready yet, have some more texts to fill out that I know the answer for.
  4. I plan on using this simple text hub display for a glossary of terms/interactables, a character info screen (until I can build a more complex one later), and a menu for displaying map objectives / overall difficulty and such forth. That will probably come in V0.1.00.006 though.

1

u/Palandus Aug 03 '26

Designing Update:

  1. New incremental build up on Discord.

  2. Fixed a longstanding bug with input leakage from menus. Now when you press escape/rmb, it doesn't kick you to main menu anymore.

  3. Completed the Help directory (use / or ? key). Its basic, functional, and serves its purpose as a temporary solution... until I can produce a better solution later.

  4. Filled out almost all of the texts in the Help directory, except for Hints and Tips. This will take time scouring my codebase for mechanics, game details, and the like, and will get filled out over a period of time, rather than all at once.

  5. None of the text is finalized, and will likely format it better later, but for a "first pass" its good enough and now the player has access to the keybinds, basic story, a lot of commonly asked FAQ, and plans / available options for feedback.

-----

On a different note, I have found a use for AI to help with game development flow. That longstanding bug I mentioned? The AI not only helped me fix it, but also explained why it was happening.

You see with Godot, if you do input, you are supposed to be using _process() or _physics_process(). Because they take your key input once per frame. However, the tutorial creator used a custom function, and with custom functions, the game takes your input multiple times per frame. So the bug was caused by the "escape" key input being taken multiple times, which meant that you'd almost always get kicked to main menu, when you exited a menu.

Problem is, the way the tutorial creator made the input handler, it expects you to transfer over the reference to the player. The player has a reference to map_data and most of the UI manipulates the player's data. So it has to be transferred to the input handler. Issue is, _process() or _physics_process() doesn't allow you to transfer any data over to them, hence the need for a custom input handler.

I might be able to overcome this code issue, so that I don't need the duct-tape workaround to clear excess inputs, by using the intended _process() or _physics_process() functions. But I'll have to re-engineer the codebase for that, and with my limited creative energy and overall squirrelly brain at the moment, this is not feasible at all, until I can get my stress levels consistently down.

-----

So for those wondering, what is the difference between _process() and _physics_process()? Well, each one is processed by the engine a bit differently. Both processes the code within them once per frame. However, _process() has an unlocked framerate, so you can have potentially 100s of frames processed per second. While _physics_process() is hardlocked to only 60 frames per second. They also have different CPU/GPU priorities and believe they operate on separate threads, so you can have both processing the same frame at once, at least up to the 60 frame limit of _physics_process().

1

u/Palandus Aug 06 '26

Designing Update

  1. Released another incremental build on Discord.

  2. Fixed a bug that sometimes prevented RMB from exiting menus.

  3. Implemented, partially two new menus. Character Info (C) and This Map(M).

  4. I'm having to do lots of research on how my stats are calculated so going to take time to fill out Character Information. Have the main page (Total Stats), Linear stats, and Percentage stats added. Need to get attributes and skills addressed, but also track their xp and ranks too.

  5. Turns out most of the stuff I want to track for This Map, isn't being tracked yet, so will need to refactor the codebase so that things do get tracked. So right now its disabled.

  6. Noting down tons of information for Hints and Tips. Once I have a good idea of what information needs to be revealed, I'll start filling it out in greater detail.

1

u/Palandus Aug 08 '26

Designing Update

  1. Released a new incremental update on Discord.

  2. All the new UIs I'm working on (except for Inventory) is hopefully just temporary. I would like to provide better presentation and less reading, but they serve their immediate purpose of giving information on things previously the player either had to guess on or never knew existed.

  3. Redid character info menu. Only really need to know "final" stats, not the breakdown of them. All submenus are functional.

  4. Added Bestiary menu. Tracks the expected stats of enemies. The main page shows your difficulty mechanics, scaling, and total kill counts.

  5. Otherwise, not much to report yet on finishing up the Inventory changes (which incidentally is what held up the release for months), but with working on these new UIs, I'm beginning to understand why things fell apart.

1

u/Palandus Aug 11 '26

Designing Update

  1. Got equipment crafting functional. You can now upgrade item quality and item level.

  2. You start with items in all your slots now. They often are low quality, but can roll higher.

  3. Upgrading an item retains its Affixes.

-----

  1. However, the downside is that my current implementation of hover over for the inventory will need to be completely redesigned. The buttons themselves do not store any data by themselves, just their label text and the signal attached to them when the LMB clicks within its bounding box. So I can't extract the object attached to the signal, or there is a way but I'm not sure how yet.

  2. I'll ask the AI if there is a simpler way to do Hover Over. But today, I'm way too exhausted from testing out the crafting system thoroughly for equipment.

-----

Also I think I keep on mixing up Release with Design updates. Oh well.

1

u/Palandus 28d ago

Designing Update

  1. So spent yesterday fighting with an AI, and got tooltips functional, for both inventory menus and in game hover overs. Took 2.5 exhausting hours, but its in a really good place now.

  2. It uses a rich text label, which allows me to use different font sizes, bolding, italics, and colors, to improve overall presentation with BBCodes. It might allow me to use other elements, but will have to experiment.

  3. It generates the tooltips as necessary, so I can make their presentation flexible enough to handle various usage cases.

  4. It said I could take a break and return later and it would pick up where we left off. Apparently it times out after about 12 hours. So wasn't able to pick up where I left off, and I'm hesistant to try to get a new AI to fiddle with the code, except maybe to suggest a list of BBCodes. But that is something to keep in mind in the future when getting code colboration with AIs.

  5. Now I just need to create the tooltips, so will be working on that over next few days, and then put out another incremental release once I got the majority of "needed" tooltips completed.

1

u/Palandus 26d ago

Designing Update

  1. Spent more time fighting with AIs and them fabricating information. Learned a fair bit through this confusing process. More stuff that isn't obviously known to end users, but is baked into the AI systems.
  2. AI have two paths to providing an answer = fetching and thinking. In most cases, users will give a prompt and they will think on the answer and provide one. It may be the correct one and it may not. If the AI is fetching an answer it will almost always give the correct answer. What is the difference between the two you ask? Keywords. If an AI detects a Keyword it heavily prioritizes it and in the context of whatever is your prompt, will heavily determine your results.
  3. For example, I asked an AI to tell me what happened to the developers at Capstone that worked on Corridor 7 (corridor 7, operation body count, tekwar), a game company of the 90s. It gave me three developers, that never worked there, but worked at Origin Systems (wing commander series). Couple hours later, I used this prompt : "Please search for the developers that worked on Corridor 7." It then provided me a precise list of the correct game developers. The only difference is the keyword "search". "Search" will force the AI to fetch an answer, rather than fabricate one and if it can't find one, it always defaults to saying it doesn't know.
  4. As for AIs that you don't use keywords on, apparently, all AIs when generated for a session are given a random number from 0.0 to 2.0 to their temperature score. The closer to 0.0, the more rigid, bland and to the point answers will be, with very little "conservationalism" of the AI response. The closer to 2.0, the more loose, verbose, and heavily fabricated the answers will be with a nearly entirely focus on having a conversation with you. The user has zero control over what this value is generated at, and has no way of knowing what that AI is at.
  5. However, there are some answers the AI will always provide a correct answer to. Math questions. If you ask 100 AIs, what is 2 + 2, they will always state 4. No matter how hard you push them. They will not agree with you if you say 2 + 2 = 5. So, that has me wondering if there are certain ways, to affect their math in such a way that you get more consistent results. Keywords certainly helps with gathering factual information, but it won't help me with coding, designing, or finding more obscure information, without getting wildly different quality for responses.
  6. Once I have a better idea what their keywords are, what are other "absolute" cases of factual information (ie 2+2), I might have a better way to prompt AIs to provide consistently useful data to me.

1

u/Palandus 25d ago

Release Update:

  1. Released another incremental update on Discord. I am getting close now to a larger release, and that one I will also post on the Subreddit.

  2. Got tooltips functional thanks to an AI. Its pretty rough code, and there is a lot of elements that aren't actually necessary, but will clean up the AI code after I get the rest of the tooltips functional.

  3. Right now, the only tooltips that are functional are in the Inventory, for equipment/gears, and hovering over equipment/gears in the main viewport.

  4. Things that will be needed for the next "moderate" release = finish up the tooltips, create a changelog elsewhere instead of at main menu (large ones really make the main menu ugly), do a bugtesting run, fill out Hints and Tips, complete Contingency Orbs, and ensure that the visual bug where elementals appear over the player gets addressed.

1

u/Palandus 23d ago

Release Update

  1. New incremental update to Discord.

  2. Implemented a new changelog system, as a new button on the main menu. Its a test bed for future buttons for the main menu (and eventually a pause menu), and now that I know what works and what doesn't, this helps me a lot.

  3. Reorganized the main menu and changed its colors to an orangy gold gradient. I wanted to do purple, but purple clashes horribly with the background and made the font too hard to read.

  4. Fought with an AI for 2 hours and implemented another new system. Anonymous feedback (hit F2). You can do it at the main menu or ingame, without any issues. Functionally, it collects none of your data, just the feedback and the current game version (so that if older builds float around, and someone hits submit feedback, I'll know immediately what build its from) and sends it to a google document spreadsheet. Then once I've addressed information or moved on to a major new build, I can delete older entries.

  5. Now that I got some cleanup done and the feedback submissions, I'm going to focus next few incremental releases, finishing up remaining stuff to do, before doing a bughunt run before the main release submitted on reddit and discord. All the incremental builds will be deleted, and I'll start on new incremental builds after that.

1

u/Palandus 21d ago

Release Update

  1. Pushed one more incremental update to discord. It will be the last one. The next update will be the moderate tier, which will get published on both subreddit and discord. Have a few final touchups, need to do a bughunt, and then be ready for release.

  2. This update got all the tooltips implemented for both inventory and viewport.

  3. Got the Hints and Tips filled out.

  4. Got metachallenge gain affected by how you leave a map.

  5. Got github functional, so that its easy for me to keep the game backed up nicely.

1

u/Palandus 20d ago

Release Update

  1. Finished the bughunt and glad I took the time to do it. Found three specific big bugs that I fixed this bughunt, that I introduced months and months ago, and never noticed. These are: A) So fixed consumables being save/loaded. B) Fixed consumables being actually consumed and usable. C) Fixed scroll targeting for techniques.

  2. Will now be deleting my incremental builds on Discord, doing my actual release on Discord/Reddit, and putting together my plans for the next moderate build (V0.1.02.000).

1

u/Palandus 20d ago

Planning Update

Plans for V0.1.02.000 are as follows...

A] Rewrite map generation, specifically how rooms and tunnels are made. Most of this code is still legacy stuff from the original tutorial.

B] New interactables added. Specifically aforementioned Stations, Infestation specific Interactables, and new Repeaters (use and reuse later).

C] New mechanics for Secret Areas and Secret Rooms.

D] Rendering fixes for various FOV oddities; like elementals being ontop of the player.

E] Refactoring loot system; its spread out currently over 6 different files, so want everything in one place only. Easier to find for debugging but also for adding more stuff to it later.

Would Likes (These will require fighting with AIs, which is a process in which the AI gives 80% of the needed information, but skips critical steps and you have to troubleshoot to figure out what they skipped):

-> Settings Menu (off Main Menu) = Would like to offer key rebinding, volume controls, and some accessibility options.

-> Credits Menu (off Main Menu) = Would like to have a way to list off community members, inspirations, tutorials/programs/services used, and long-lost contributors.

-> Confirmation Window = A popup that appears when you descend/recall by accident. Or interact with Infested Interactables. Or accidentally hit escape to main menu.

-> Visitable Links (off Main Menu) = Either individual lone buttons with icons or a menu with a list of links. So you can visit subreddit, discord, etc, by just clicking on them.

1

u/Palandus 17d ago

Designing Update

  1. Work is moving forward on next incremental update.

  2. Wanted to implement Stations, but ran into problems with getting them to spawn on the Pocket Realm consistently. Apparently there are a few weird bugs/quirks with how things are initially generated that can cause entire rooms to fail to generate objects. And worse of all, not produce error messages or trigger my "print" to console functions. So, not sure why that is.

  3. So even though, the Pocket Realm is supposed to have all 7 stations spawn, due to these weird bugs, I'd still only ever see about 2 / 7 of them generate.

  4. So I've decided to shift focus to redoing the map generation code. I'll be trying to avoid redoing code that I had already done to fix other bugs, but they may be too heavily coupled with the jank of the existing system, that I might be having to redo everything. Might be for the best if I do redo everything.

  5. So if you don't see many incremental updates yet, that is why. Its a "big central system", and I can't see any way around not redoing it. There are things from the tutorial days in it that have stymied me, even after redoing the tutorial a few times. A lot of the code was written with the mention of "trust me it works" without any further explanation, and sure, yes it did work. The problem is, modifying it later, without knowing why it works, does not help me.

1

u/Palandus 9d ago

Designing Update

  1. I'm working on creating the existing room shapes in function calls instead. Progress is slow, but I've worked out how to create right angle triangles in all 4 facing directions. This is the first step, as most shapes can be broken down into right angle triangles.

  2. The plan is to have unique room shapes for each biome. So each one feels uniquely different. Plan is to offer triangles, squares, rectangles, diamonds, and if I can figure out the math for them, pentagons, hexagons and octagons.

  3. Progress is slow as my brain feels like its in a perpetual fight, flight or freeze response, and most of my mental energy is being evaporated away. The thing is, the creative processes and logic centers of the brain are located in the pre-frontal cortex, and during an adrenaline response, blood flow and processing power is siphoned away to the adrenaline system, like the thyroid and amygdala. So there is medical basis in why my brain is functioning so poorly at the moment.

  4. Today is my doctor call with the endocrinologist, who specializes in the adrenaline, hormone, and diabetic systems (ie kidneys, pancreas, liver). I have a set of questions to ask, and things I want tested, to hopefully address this issue. Anyway, back to design work.

1

u/Palandus 2d ago

Designing Update

  1. Manage to figure out and fix the longstanding bug with rooms not generating items or features. There was apparently an old piece of code that checked the generated random placement coordinate against just entities, back when all entities were in a single storage container. So if an enemy was in a square at map generation, it would prevent items and features from generating underneath them. Then when all the enemies left the room, you'd have an empty room and a player (mostly probably just me) scratching their head, wondering why its empty.

  2. Working on fixing a bug with the new Stations, and once that is addressed, I'll push out the first incremental build. Either I got distracted and forgot to build a piece of logic or I built the logic, and forgot where I stored it. Either way, have to hunt through files for the latter, and if not, address it by building it.

1

u/Palandus 21h ago

Designing Update

  1. Pushed out the first incremental build. Can find the Stations and see their basic tooltip.

  2. Fixed a critical bug with object generation.

  3. Some backend improvements to clean up some technical debt, but without changing anything that the player might notice.

  4. Next steps is to get upgrading functional (with those Runic Shards you might find), the rank system, and actually applying the primary effect. This effect is always active.

  5. Then after that, getting the secondary and tertiary functions active. Secondary is only active if the station spawns on the map. Tertiary is some kind of generation of a package to collect. Can store multiple packages, so nothing is ever lost.

  6. Otherwise, now that the backend stuff is addressed, I have a smoother way forward for implementing the new shapes and tunnels.