Week 9: Nearing the End

Hello, and welcome to week 9 of my blog! This week was composed mostly of bug fixes and refining the mechanics of the project. This post will mostly address specific issues I’ve faced, similar to last week. Just for documentation and for the sake of content, I’ll be covering some of the issues here!

Move List – So I’ve finally gotten the actions for the turn-based system set up and working properly, though GB Studio’s visual scripting format did occasionally make errors a bit difficult to pinpoint. For example, when I was adapting the fireball move to my input system, I had mistakenly left an event in the move-detection segment that would reset the intended action for all moves except for the basic attack. After combing through the debugger and comparing the detection logic, I eventually found that I kept setting the CurrentAction variable to an unassigned number, causing the move not to be registered in the turn.

UI Fixes- I’ve also managed to pinpoint the mistake made when adapting the UI. In my previous post, I mentioned an issue with the HP counter when the enemy attacks the avatar. To understand what went wrong here, we need to understand how the UI actually functions. As I also explained in the last post, the UI text elements are actually actors – in the same way that the enemy and player are actors, all taking up actor slots. More precisely, each digit is an actor with sprite states ranging from 0-9, which are combined with some mathematical operations in order to display the tens and ones place of any given value (Enemy HP, Player HP, Player Energy/MP, respectively, from left to right in my game’s context). This system was taken from a publicly available turn-based system made by BadDesignBryan & Kalanakila on Itch.io. My error was simple – I accidentally only copied the tens place update event when the enemy attacked instead of pasting both update events for tens and one place of player HP. This was an easy fix, but it did take me a bit to figure out, as the debugger didn’t flag anything.

With all that said and done, I am now looking at a final push to refine my product. With the presentation date soon approaching, I need to work on double-checking my data as well as creating a basic progression and tutorial for my game.