DraconicSyntax
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Development Update - revised schedule
🕑 Added 2023-02-08 16:14:32 +0000 UTCSome good and bad news in this one, but mostly good news!
The good news is in just the couple days I've had since finishing the ground pound abilitiy, I've already almost entirely caught up on the previous week's work that got delayed due to the time it was taking me to finish ground pound. It seems I was right after all about most of the abilities still being rather quick and easy to implement, and I'm making good headway overall.
The "bad" news is that I've realized a few more of the abilities than I originally thought will be dependant on new systems and code framework that doesn't yet exist - basically I've gotten a bit ahead of myself in the excitement to make new powerups that I've forgotten more foundation work that needs to exist to support much of it - putting the horse before the cart, if you will. If I continued to try and make ALL the abilities currently on the production schedule, many would rely on code that's going to be deleted and replaced immediately after this update - for example, many of the abilities include new ways to damage enemies, but due to how I'm completely rewriting the enemy code into a state machine (same as the player's code now uses), the current method for how damage boxes work will be completely replaced with something much simpler and more efficient. Creating these new abilities now will just result in more work down the line as I have to recreate them again with the new systems. The ground pound ability is a good example, as it currently only deals damage thanks to a scrappy method where it reuses a form of the kick collision box, which causes issues in other areas of the code that I haven't bothered fixing yet since it's all moot anyway when I replace the enemy code.
All this really needs to fix the problem though is adjusting the order in which things are developed! My new plan is to keep developing abilities as they appear on the production schedule, but completely skip any that rely on new systems that haven't been made, and instead just add them at a later point in development as they become viable.
There will still be one more beta build coming up, and after that I'll move to the public release for the skill tree stuff (which now may be coming slightly sooner than originally predicted) while starting on the animations for 4 prey to finish off the rest of v0.7 (and probably another Patreon poll regarding those animations). There are already 20 and counting working skills already, so I think these will still make a good initial batch for the community to test!
Version v0.8 is going to be a very, very large update when all is said and done - but I'll make a seperate post about it when development reaches that point!
