Esoteric Update #178 - This Was A Bad Week

I'm sorry to say this again, but the last week wasn't too good for me. My health's been on a decline the previous week, and it was a struggle to force myself to do anything.

And maybe because of that, I've also felt like I've been flailing around with the game development. That is to say, it's been hard to focus on any specific direction in development, and as such, I've worked on several unrelated things over the last days.

So, first off, the most significant endeavour I undertook, taking up a whole two days of my time, has incidentally also been a total bust. There's an issue with overscrolling in the interface that I tried to fix, and unfortunately, I've not been successful. After trying multiple solutions that should have resolved the issue, I couldn't say the way any of them worked actually improved the UX. I'll try to get at it again, but this is, unfortunately, one of those places where what I want to do gets into a fight with the libraries I'm using.

Secondly, at one point, I just woke up, for some reason, and ended up doing some math. So anyway, it seems I extended the magic circle generator by a little bit. 

Next up, I might have started getting into the issue of... well... facial recognition in the game. Hold up. It's not what it might seem. The feature I'm trying to deal with here is the ability of NPCs to recognise you based on your facial features. It's something that I already attempted to prototype once and wasn't happy with the results. So I'm taking on a slightly different approach this time, and it seems more promising so far. Essentially it's about the way cosmetics and clothing can let you go not so much undetected but unrecognised and possibly easily forgotten.

I'll try to have some demonstrations done for the next update.

We've also extended the selection of clothing, but this time not exactly by adding new items. Instead, what we ended up adding are tartan versions of existing items. There are a bunch of skirts and also simple pants available in tartan, and we might do more in the future. The tartans are common actual real-world patterns. I'd also say that they span a good variety of colour combinations.

Finally, a thing I started doing on Monday... before I was going to do this update, but functionally before I passed out... was to slightly change how tooltips for items show up. This was mostly an accessibility/UX issue. But I'm currently much happier with them being displayed out of the way, in the corner, like this.

I guess it's worth also saying that I found some bugs in the game that I ended up fixing, and that one was quite an interesting case (an attributed item, when placed alone in a container, would cause the game to crash when the container was looked at/into, and yes, it had to be specifically a single item). This is now resolved. Another issue was that short socks would crash the game. I have no idea how that item never got tested... It's also fixed now.

There will not be an update next week. As much as I'd love to say I'm going to be spending my time with family over the holiday, the truth is that I'm just way too weak, and I need to spend some time in bed.