Day 4 and 5 - Not tracking to requirements
Writing a devlog is punishing. Putting down in writing the tragedies and absurdities and impulsive detours. That's why I'm only now writing about nearly three days ago.
Day 4 was the point when the gap between plans and reality became undeniable. For me anyway, Seilburg is an eternal optimist. (He claimed we had nearly everything in place, forgetting we hadn't even begun on your boss or on metagoals!) He started the day strongly by writing a framework for tasks and their requirements, which make extra interactions available. Then I spent the day extending, refactoring and rewriting it. Of course all the code churn meant lots of bugs. Strangely, during planning I never considered that this system would be complex. (Godot 4 adds closures, probably the most useful feature a scripting language can have. We went crazy.)
During a 7DRL it's probably a bad idea spending an hour or two adding a convenience to make it faster to add content. But I worked on so many conveniences I had little time for content! And worse, I spent a long while digging into GDScript minutiae to understand dynamic type checking and parser edgecases so I could write an "is_instance_of" function. It only took me a day to notice the warning about shadowing the builtin "is_instance_of" function.
Of course I spent most of Day 5 still working on task requirements and interactions... it's just never flexible enough! (Note from the future: the saga continues in Day 6.) The "Get me a donut" task still can't require delivery. But I did some other things too... like more UI tweaking, argh. And I finally added an actual performance score for the player; they need to collect points to keep their job. (No performance targets yet though!) Seilburg spent a lot of time on the beginning/end of day screens, which I worry aren't core gameplay either. Oh, I also finally added wall-checking. Honestly it feel more like a game than many of our ours by Day 5!
Seilburg started on a map generator but I'm disappointed that when they rewrote tilemaps and tilesets in Godot 4 (probably my most hated feature in Godot 3) they somehow made it even more of a pain to set up autotiling correctly, and less documentation. And that's why we still have no map.
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Yeah, working with Godot 4 was a pain in the ass in a way or another. Had the same thought about tilemaps, there are a lot of parameters to simply set a tile, somehow they made it even worst. Cool idea for your game, the theme is different and that's valuable.
Thanks. It's the unusual type of emergent gameplay that I hope will result that interests me; the theme is just a way to make a game about manipulating NPCs.
Days later, working on better mapgen, we're still struggling to get Godot 4's new constraint-propagation autotiler to produce desired results. It seems a bit unreliable when it has limited tile variants to work with and there are mysterious tricks to its use.