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I'm Going Through Changes🎼

Today was my first good day with some big wins. There was a lot of refactoring to do, and still is, but it felt good to get two refactors fully handled and error free. Unfortunately, I came into this whole thing with zero knowledge, which means I have made a lot of mistakes in terms of everything from the order of assembly to the manner. The biggest one was my input handling, which started out as raw inputs being handled manually by script. This led to weird bugs in many places, so while the successful refactor was a big deal in and of itself, the fact that it fixed the broken elements of my dialog structure felt like an even bigger win.

Right now I'm in what I call circular NRE mode...non repeating engineering work...that repeats lol - I basically roll through the game and reafactor/repair everything to the best of what I know, then I look at what I've got and figure out how it could be made more responsive, more robust, and more reliable. I didn't know there were three R's, but hey.

So at the end of each day right now, I'm pretty much still where I was, but with minor improvements to flow and methodology. I scrapped the start screen I had - which had a hand drawn background and 2D colliders all setup - in favor of a blank white screen. The plan as of now is to get all the basic movement and interaction tested in this screen before advancing to create more in depth scenes.

I'm hesitant to release the details of the game's plot and action, because I think I've got a few things here that haven't been done - but anyone with decent coding experience could probably pick up with my idea and churn it out faster than I could compete with - and I definitely want to be the first person to release my idea. I'm sure as things progress it will be impossible to avoid, but, by that time I should have the basics all together and expect that development will begin to pick up some steam.

Speaking of Steam, I will be uploading the game to Steam very early in development, but probably not releasing/sharing it. This way the expense of getting it on the Steam store will be out of the way. My understanding is that I can push updates whenever I want at no additional cost, so this would enable me to test out the mechanics on the Deck well before the game is complete, and also to update when new advances are made. Eventually even probably beta testing opportunities if there's any interest - but I'll admit, I'm pretty much just making the game I want to play, so I'm not really planning on advertising or trying to achieve sales.

Anyway, here's a summary of today's work:

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Devlog Summary:

NPC Dialogue & Input Control Improvements
Switched NPC dialogue from static Inspector arrays to JSON-based dialogue loading:

Dialogue data is now stored in external JSON files (e.g., Frogbert.json), making it easier to manage, edit, and expand dialogue content without rebuilding the game.

Implemented a simple JSON loader using Unity’s Resources.Load and JsonUtility to deserialize dialogue into a strongly-typed DialogueData class.

Dynamic dialogue retrieval:

NPC scripts load dialogue from JSON at runtime and split dialogue strings into multiple lines for display, improving flexibility and future scalability.

NPCs now trigger dialogue using the loaded JSON data instead of hardcoded string arrays.

Input control enhancements:

Integrated input handling with Unity’s new Input System for player interactions (GamePlay.Interact action).

Ensured proper subscription and unsubscription to input events based on player proximity to NPCs, preventing input event duplication or leakage.

Dialogue advancement is handled via a dedicated input action (Dialogue.Advance), toggling input maps between gameplay and dialogue contexts for smoother UX.

Added duplicate action bindings, so Skullie_World will be ready to play on PC or Steam Deck once complete.

Hierarchy organization:

Grouped all dialogue-related GameObjects under a single empty parent in the scene hierarchy for better organization without affecting functionality.

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I will try to keep a running list of all devlog entries here

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Thanks for checking out some more of my work! As always, I hope you enjoyed witnessing as much as I enjoyed creating!

© Photos and words by @albuslucimus, except where otherwise indicated.

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