Hello friends, it's been just over a year since my last devlog. This is my third attempt to write this, so I think I will try to be more concise this time, lol. 

I am still working on the game as I am able to. Right now that still means remaking the dialog files. Initially, I was only going to remake days 6+ because the early days were behaving normally, but ultimately I decided to go back and make new individual files for days 1-5 as well. I have recently completed day 10, and am in the process of testing that out. As you may recall, day 10 is pretty complex, so the testing for that is more involved, and will take longer than the other days. Then I will move on to day 11 and then I will be looking for help from people to test to make sure we are as back to 100% as possible.

In my personal life, at the beginning of the year, I moved into an apartment with my girlfriend and her 2 boys. I did not work on the game at all in the last months of 2024, or the first months of 2025 because of moving and all the things that go with these kind of life changes. I have been finding some time to work on it again, but of course, as I knew it would be, it is pretty limited. My girlfriend knows about the game is generally supportive of me working on it, but I still need to be very careful because of the boys. Lol, even just trying to write this devlog, I have been interrupted twice.

Beyond just fixing the dialog situation, I have been forced to/been able to dig into some of the lingering things that cause me headaches in the game, specifically the NPC interactions.  There has never been a very clean handshake between 2 npcs interacting. And I have sort of used scotch tape and bubble gum to make them work. But the more situations that require NPC interaction, especially as they can alter each others task lists, the messier it has gotten.  And every time I had a new situation where NPCs interacted that I was adding to the game, it seemed like things did not behave the way I expected. Like they would go to the wrong task on their list, or get stuck because conditions were not met to advance to the next task, etc. I won't get into the detail, but it boiled down to the order in which the NPCs determine when to move onto the next task vs when they think they've completed their current task.

I have reworked this, and I believe I have a clean NPC handshake now,  where setting up task lists and having NPC interaction SHOULD be predictable and reliable without having to make exceptions on a case by case situation. But of course after having done that, my NPCs are behaving odd because of those case by case exceptions I had been making. Think of it kind of like you have joystick drift on a controller. So you set up rubber bands to pull your joystick ever so slightly to compensate for the drift. Then at some point you ACTUALLY fix the joystick and now your rubber bands are screwing up your control. So now I'm going in and removing the rubber bands.

One actual QOL improvement (Yah! something that isn't just fixing broken stuff for the first time in over a year!!!) I have recently added a button to the Day Data Override menu. It is a button that attaches to each event, and once pressed, selects or deselects the necessary required events for that original event. This was a suggestion made in the Discord.

This "Rq" button should make setting up the events you want to see significantly easier. But fair warning, the button is sort of the simplest implementation of this that it could be.  If click the button for 2 conflicting events (meaning they are mutually exclusive), it will make the last of the two you pressed meet the requirements, but it's not smart enough to tell you you've just undone the previous one. Similarly, there are a number of events that could be reached under different circumstances. "X" must have happened OR "Y" must have happened. I have only set this up to select for one set of requirement conditions. So the button will make sure that "X" happened, but doesn't even know about "Y." A perfect implementation of the system would be capable of knowing about both options and selecting one option depending on what other events/requirements are selected. There are certain events which may have some conflicting conditions, but may actually not be mutually exclusive with alternative conditions. This system is not smart enough to make that happen, lol, but it will get you what you want 95% of the time.

As I mentioned earlier, I will begin working on Day 11 after testing Day 10, and then will release a testbuild for anyone willing to help. Then I will attempt to work on Day 12. I'm not exactly sure how that will go, but I would like to try.

Any way, thanks for taking the time to read this,

the cyborgmummy