Week 9: Blog 9 (Detailed Analysis of Economies in MMOs)

Having mastered the art of Godot, I did some decent work this week! Hopefully the polish isn’t going to mess me up down the line.

• Monday. With the deadline of the project soon approaching, I did one last test run through the python version (text-based) and made sure it all worked roughly correctly. After that, I started directly porting over whatever code I could to the visual editor. Not much else happened besides basic setup.
• Tuesday, I tried getting custom fonts to work in the game so that the information would appear a bit more stylized. Unfortunately, it was giving me some hassles, so I decided to put that on hold. With fonts not working, I decided to take a break and grab images for my slideshow, along with working on said slideshow more due to the incoming deadline.
• Wednesday was also fairly uneventful. It mainly consisted of painful porting over of code again. For some quick context about the actual structure of the code:
  • The main code (python) was made with prayers and packaging tape (metaphorically, of course). Everything was done in one class, with the exception of creating one object without methods. Money was handled quite inefficiently, due to python’s limitations on global variables, and the menuing for the game itself was poorly executed for a visual format.
  • Thus, the entirety of Wednesday consisted of hooking up buttons to commands and trying to get an automatic processing of the buttons (in other words, automatically adapting menus to the amount of stocks available) was a huge hassle. Hooking up those functions ended up taking the entire day and a little extra. (That being said, Godot was a much more convenient editor in the end.)
• Thursday was mainly bug testing. Nothing interesting aside from a really weird bug with references not exactly working. On that note, did you know that Godot’s scenetree allows for some really convenient inheritance properties that should’ve let me make menu screens easier, except for the fact that I didn’t use them at first? Who would’ve guessed.
• Friday was another unfun day of polish. I made some temporary sprites to be used in the final product (to be redone if I manage to have any extra time), plugged those in, prayed they worked, and surprisingly it functioned okay. I also started with a long list of “things I need to do before submission if I miraculously find time”, such as cleaner transitions and minor bugfixes. I don’t know if any of these things will find their inclusion by the end of next week, but I really do hope that they do.