tangofiction
Status Post - UI Completion
Published: December 8th 2022, 2:25:54 am
Hi. A lot of stuff has happened lately and it will take quite a few posts to explain everything but I wanted to do a highlight / status post.
We will start with some REALLY good news.
I wanted to use what I learned making the Transfigure html game and apply that to the new commercial 3D version. One of the main things I wanted to do is to tackle the difficult code projects first and start with a greater level of organization.
So that’s what I’ve done over the past two months and I am happy to report I have succeeded. It took a lot of hours, tutorials, and trial and error but Transfigure Ren Py has all of its core UI systems working, including a fully unlockable image gallery, a scene recollection room, and the ending tracking with 100+ endings coded into it. It also has music and sound effects plus art that is getting better by the day.
I was dreading coding the ui because I felt it was the hardest task blocking me from finishing the project and the most technically over my head. Everything else I already know how to do. So in development terms, I’ve already completed the hardest job to make a complete high quality game.
This leads me around to what I think is the biggest question people have in general and that’s why are the html updates so slow? The answer to this is fairly simple. The project has grown too large and my computer is too dated to work on it with any degree of efficiency. For example I just added a period to a sentence in the game. I timed it and it took over 3 minutes. For a single period. Imagine that multiplied across thousands of passages. Often I edit a passage and it’s so lagged I create new errors on top of the ones I fix purely due to lag. So every month I write as much as I can but the final process of adding things to the engine and troubleshooting it is so frustrating it makes me want to snap. I can’t navigate the game without a map. A process that would take 15 minutes on a small game or a fast computer takes me many, many multiples of that.
It’s just not sustainable to work like that. I’ve only managed so far by doing everything off engine and then slogging through the add to engine process. (I do have a solution for this problem but I will talk about that in another post.)
Compare this to Python I am using now. I hit a key and it responds instantly in a tiny fraction of a second. Everything is super fast and fun to work on again! It’s a total breath of fresh air that has actually allowed me to get back into some of these stories and really start finishing them off. It’s really hard to be creative and fast waiting 1-3 minutes for a period vs instant.
Luckily the base content (text) is transferable so there are synergies between the projects.
So everything’s going really well overall. Productivity is sky high. I thought it would take months to get the UI buttoned down but things are moving much faster.
Transfigure Ren Py now contains 5 endings and the intro content is about half done. It’s full of placeholder art but it’s looking really sharp. I also have another exciting announcement plus a lot of dev news but I will save that until .58 is released. I’m going to try to finish it tonight and release it ASAP.
Have a great day!