- tested dream mode ending level 2 again; the problem with aphrodite disappearing still happened, although not consistently. i made some changes to the code which may prevent it, will need to test it again tomorrow.

a few days ago i had a dream about an internet friend, long-time readers of this lj may remember her; she went by different lj names: jevkis, jevkis_gryphon, cinnamon_squire, and aerofrost. she did some of the voice acting for my 2006 game alphasix. i was friends with her between 2005 and 2007, after which she sort of vanished from the internet without a trace; even taernost, who knew her in real life and was roomates with her for a time, doesn't know where she went (last he heard she was in utah or something). all her lj's are deleted, and her last comment on my lj was in 2008, as an anonymous user. haven't heard from her since. she wanted to be a monster designer for videogames.

i haven't thought about her in a number of years, but all of a sudden that dream caused her to be on my mind again, in a sentimental fashion. she was a pretty good friend, always positive and friendly, in a way very few people are. i know a lot of good people, and i think it's safe to say i've never met anyone more cheery. i think it's impossible for anyone to get to know her and not to love her (i don't mean romantically).

looking back over my emails from her, i regret not replying to a lot of them. she'd send me things like pictures of her pet claude (a hamster? hard to tell from the photo) or her halloween pictures, or a song she liked, or short stories that she wrote, and i was either too busy or too uninterested to reply i guess, because those emails usually have no reply from me. i guiltily imagine that if i had just put a little more effort into the friendship, or else been better at friendship back then, she wouldn't have disappeared from the internet so suddenly. i know rationally that that's unlikely to have made a difference, but i still feel terrible about it; sort of how, when someone dies, you realize how much you took them for granted.

i tried to find out what she's up to now by searching online, but found nothing. so i'm making this post partly just in case she one day googles her old internet names and finds it and sees fit to let me (and taernost and her other old internet friends) know how she's doing today.

- i stayed up really late for this task, but it's done: all the skills of the skill tree are checked over, coded, improved where necessary, and so on; i went through all 100 skills over yesterday and today and finished the ones that weren't finished, fixed a number of bugs in them, and improved a few and made a few more interesting; this task is done now*

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tomorrow i'll resume work on the long-neglected task of ending dream mode level 2, which i started late last month but have yet to finish. after that, i'll continue on my even longer-neglected task of the pre-playtesting playthrough (in which i play through the game and note down bugs that i find).

- now that the skill tree visualization was done, i started on finishing up the remaining godstatue powers that make up that skilltree; there are 100 powers in all, 50 for exploration mode and 50 for dream mode, each point on the skill tree is one ability for each mode. prior to today, 75 of those were coded, and 25 remained. i got 15 of those remaining 25 coded today, so there's 10 left before i can call this another completed task; i most likely will be able to finish up those 10 tomorrow.
- i also changed and improved some of the older godstatue powers today, and fixed a few bugs in some of them. some powers were just too boring so i changed them to something more interesting
- i started implementing the lake limit (the game's time limit) system today. this is a future task that i'm getting a jump start on, but i started on it because several godstatue powers have to do with that system. i'm unsure about whether to apply this system to all game modes or not. i feel that no matter how long a player has, some players will feel pressured by having a total time limit that they have to complete the game in (for example, pikmin, fallout 1, and sword of jade had a similar system). but i personally like time limits like that, because they add a level of tension to a game, particularly in games where you could explore forever unless you have some driving force pushing you on. and it goes with the game's story, too. so i think i'll make it for all difficulty levels, but just give a very generous limit to the easiest difficulty level.
- and fixed a bug in the text width with the smaller font.
- added the time countdown limit display to the quitting menu
- added a few more random quitting messages (to make mention of the time limit and somewhat explain it to the player)

overall today was very productive -- even though i didn't finish any tasks, i made good progress towards finishing one task and started on another. i'm looking forward to each new day of work on SD even more than usual.

- fixed a bug that caused the title screen to be slow
- the skill tree visualization task is now done! i may improve it later if i see a way to, and i want to move the text a bit lower than it is in this screenshot, but since it's effectively done. here's what it looks like now (if you compare to the other screenshot i posted a few days ago you'll notice some improvements)*

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- continued working on skill tree task; in particular integrating it into the game rather than just having it test on the debug screen and title screen. got most of that done today. i will finish that tomorrow and polish the skill tree's visual tomorrow too. this task is taking longer than i expected, but it's also more fun to create than i expected

- put a lot more work into the skill tree. almost done with it! i'm liking it a lot better now

- continued working on the appearance of the skill tree. made a lot of progress today and it's a lot better than it was yesterday. here's how it looks now. the branches shift around and move in response to the mouse. ignore the "continue/newgame/etc." and "studioeres" text, i just (for testing) put the skill tree on the title screen for now.

- continued working on the skill tree visualization. it's better now, but it still looks very ugly. i've ideas to improve it visually, it's just a matter of experimentation and time. this list of skill trees is good inspiration: http://kotaku.com/5978575/the-hidden-beauty-of-skill-trees -- some of those are ugly, some pretty, it's a mix, but it's nice to see how different games handled it.

- started work on visualizing the godstatue powers "skill tree". i'm not quite sure where i want to place it or how i want it to be accessible yet, however. but first i want to get it working at least; so far it's mostly working, but i need to make it slightly prettier / less ugly tomorrow, and also code a way to access it from the godstatue upgrade menu and from outside of that menu (perhaps from the worldmap menu). after that i'll count it as a task completed; it's possible i can finish this task tomorrow

i know i'm halfway done through another task already (ending dream mode level 2) but working on this is more appealing at the moment because it isn't a lot of trail and error and balancing, but it's more of creating a new feature for the game that doesn't exist yet; it was going to be one of my next tasks anyway

- converted the .ogg files to use password encryption to avoid people just listening to the music from the folder (this was requested by long dao, who wanted the opportunity to sell the game's soundtrack); also actually used an encrypted password as the password to prevent people getting the password from decompilation (probably totally unnecessary but fun)
- fixed a bug i introduced yesterday accidentally

- coded special explosions for the local mammoths in dream mode (previously they used the normal creature code for that), and a separate one for aphrodite (this wasn't an essential task, just a fun thing from the wish list i wanted to do)
- went through some more of the crazy mary cd's that armand had given me (to see if there's anything useful there) and converted the ones i liked into .wav files

today was a fun-work day where i worked on wishlist stuff (i got the idea from a suggestion of newy). i'll try to do these days every so often (maybe once a week).

- same as yesterday, continued working on the level and bug list. in particular i fixed an annoying bug that caused a stutter at the start of dream levels, which i'm happy about finally fixing. today went well.

- setup the layout for the second ending dream mode level; i may be able to finish that level tomorrow, will see. i want to code a special explosion for aphrodite too.
- continued fixing bugs here and there to reduce the bug list, made good progress by fixing several of the harder to fix bugs (like the line-pulling breaking for the 'under the tree' part of trees, etc.). very happy with today's progress.

- fixed the main bug standing in the way of continuing work on my next task, so i'll start work on that task tomorrow
- continued working on the bug list, but didn't do very many of them because of a problem with getting one of them fixed (voronoi chrona effect) leading to a lot of dead-ends; overall though i'd say i fixed 5 of the bugs on that list, so now it's down to about 55, almost half of what it was before yesterday
- went through the 'wish list' (which are optional tasks that don't count as task numbers) and reorganized it, getting rid of some that i did and arranging them in order of what i'd like to do. most of these wishlist items aren't that important, are optional, and probably won't ever be added to the game, but i like having a list of things i want to improve about the game for future patches/improvements to it

- the bug list was getting pretty big (almost 100 items) so i took the day to pare it down a bit -- i got 34 bugs fixed out of those 100, so about 1/3. this is pretty good, even though those were the 1/3 of the bugs that were the easiest to fix. i'm not going to continue fixing the remaining 60 of these tomorrow, i just wanted to take a day to keep the bug list manageable (i guess 100 bugs feels like too much to me but 60 feels manageable? haha). i do plan on fixing the majority of these before beta testing though.

- fixed the major bug i wanted to fix yesterday. however, i found another bug that's preventing me from starting work on the second of the two ending dream mode levels since it's an ending sequence breaking thing. will work on that bug tomorrow.
- balanced the terraforming system to make larger lilypads worth a larger amount of lake purity value instead of all sizes of lilypads being equal

- apparently some change i did recently messed up creature activation code for dream mode; so i spent the day tracking down the bug. little to no progress except that i know what it's not. well, this is frustrating. i do have some leads though, and will continue looking for this bug tomorrow (this bug makes testing dream mode impossible because some, but not all, of the creature types fail to appear in the level, or are destroyed somehow before the player gets to them. it's weird how it happens with some creature types but not others, this should be a clue to tracking down the bug, but i can't think of what in common the two types have)
- changed the way the 'weapon' function works in dream mode (was too overpowered in that it did damage 60 times a second; switched it to 6 times a second)

- continued working on aphrodite dream mode code; fixed a few more bugs, made some balance changes. almost done with aphrodite dream mode code; should finish it tomorrow.

- continued work on aphrodite dream code
- fixed a bug related to the global.hostile variable and dream mode
- finished the first of the two ending dream mode levels*
- eva streamed playing SD today and the few people who watched gave me useful advice about what to improve in the intro

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i didn't get all the tasks done in april that i wanted to, but i'm happy with it overall, because the harder/bigger tasks that i had planned for april are either done or almost done. may is going to be an important month; i want to begin beta testing in may, so i'll be focusing on those tasks which absolutely need to be done before beta testing.

i can see the path to completion pretty clearly. it's very nice to think about the number of tasks this way: when i started with the task number system almost exactly two years ago in april of 2011, it had 840 tasks on it. at that point, the game was about two-thirds done, and the 840 tasks represented the work needed to finish the final third of the game (not a small amount of work). over the last two years, 791 of those 840 tasks are completed! that's more than 19/20ths. so basically i "see the light at the end of the tunnel"

- fixed a bug with the music of aphrodite in dream mode
- set up the level layour and creature placement for the first of the two end-game dream mode levels
- started on dream mode aphrodite code

- today was largely spent bugfixing a particular bug about aphrodite which i thought i had fixed yesterday; managed to fix it, i think, by the end of the day though. i don't like bug-fixing days where no progress is made except to fix something that i thought was already fixed, but it's unavoidable

- tested some of the stuff from yesterday
- fixed a bug with hostile mode bosses, aphrodite's minions, and aphrodite herself appearing without a draw color when they are created by scripts
- coded the image index for the new sprite for aphrodite which komera had sent me awhile back (previously i was using a placeholder of kobu)

- i created the correct 'default' dream area files for the two new faces, and set their names and music and room sizes etc., which i will start work on tomorrow after testing the below sequence

- this is complicated to explain, but basically i made it so that the game correctly creates the right 'face' objects (which are the gateways into dream mode) during the right parts in the ending, and that being successful at those face objects creates the correct progression through the ending; i haven't actually tested it yet but i did the necessary changes to the code and it remains to be tested tomorrow. it's actually more complicated than i'd like, the code for the whole ending sequence is a bit messy. here's the flow chart for the triggers and the results of that trigger for the three central endings to the game, which is most of what i coded today... the rest of this entry is a spoiler, so don't read if you care about that sort of thing

aphrodite is at (-12, -11) when global.hostile is true
aphrodite dies -> create deathaphrodite.txt
aphrodite friended -> create lifeaphrodite.txt and create face3 in (-12, -11)
deathaphrodite.txt -> go to ending splash
dream mode level success at (-12, -11) -> move to room(0, 0) and create either face3 in (0, 0) or lastlife.txt there, depending on terraforming level
dream mode level success at (0, 0) -> create extralife.txt
extralife.txt -> ending splash
lastlife.txt -> ending splash

in english, this basically means that if you kill aphrodite, you don't go through the final two dream mode levels and get one ending. if instead you friend aphrodite, you get a dream mode level to play through, and after you beat that, you are warped to a new room. if the terraforming level was below 100%, you get a second ending and the game ends there. if the terraforming level was high enough, instead you get another dream mode level at 0,0, and if you beat that, you get a third ending.

there are actually a couple of other optional endings to the game; mostly involving the secret areas outside of the lake. i believe there are three optional endings in those places, two of which are planned and one of which is finished (but needs me to set the correct music for that room), but those optional endings don't show you the credits and don't end the central story of the game, they just simply exit the game. so basically the game will have 6 endings, 3 'core' endings and 3 'side' endings, not counting the 'bad' endings when you get absorbed by aphrodite which aren't really endings i guess

anyway, the point is that there's a lot of complicated sequence trigger stuff that i coded today, which was necessary before i could get to actually creating the two dream mode levels i mentioned above

- finished first/intro dream mode level*

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