24082020
Met with Haolun tonight. We drove around and ate fried chicken with pickled radishes.
Anyways, today was a productive day. Finished up the first section of stream, terminating in the drainage pool; and implemented a number of general systemic changes, including slight adjustments to various ticks (particularly fatigue and willpower. I also cleaned up the rain audio a bit; for some reason, previously, I had implemented the fade-in/out directly into the audio track itself, which led to inconsistent results in-game as the looping did not work properly (the audio would fade-in and fade-out before looping).
Lastly, I conducted the first full test for all the systemic ticks, including measuring the equivalence between in-game and real-world time. One full in-game day (encompassing a full 24 hours), takes about seventy minutes of real-time. I’d still like to adjust some of the tick rates a bit – especially for hunger and thirst, which depreciate pretty quickly – but overall I’m pretty satisfied (and remarkably surprised honestly, given how little actual testing I did beyond the spreadsheet calculations) with the rate of progression for the stats across the board, including stuff like daylight and weather transitions.
Overall it’s gotten me thinking about how I’m handling the presentation of various needs again, and I’m once again reconsidering building a mind-map-esque approach to Avery’s various needs, desires, and objectives, similar to how Pathologic 2 handles it. I think I’m gonna start experimenting with it tomorrow so hopefully I’ll have a rough draft by the end of the week; but basically, I think it’ll be a unique state Avery can enter while she’s resting (either in the world or in a static location such as the outpost/at a campsite) with its own animation and UI, somewhat similar to meditation of sorts.
Also
adjusted some of the weather states to reflect more diverse atmospheric possibilities; and implemented a fast temp save on exit, which quickly saves the game should the application suddenly or unexpectedly close (also works for normal exits). A more elegant implementation would probably involve creating a new temporary save file specifically to handle these kinds of cases, which is then deleted upon game start. I don’t know if I can be bothered to do that, though.