Development Update #28 - Gallery #2

Hello there guys. 

If you, as a new patron has the habit of looking through the old Development Updates here, you must know already that I'm not that fond of creating a Gallery for the project. It's not that I hate a gallery, but I knew that to add something like this on the game I would need to make some changes to the JSON files and the editor itself (for the JSON Files). That being said, the other reason was I knew creating the mechanics for the gallery would be a pain. And oh, a pain it is indeed.

Anyway, this month I was able to do some new stuff since the Background part is already working - at least the mechanics are working, as I said, the game is a junction between the mechanics and the JSON file as instructions. Right now there's no instruction on the JSON file to inform the game when you can as a player access the image on the gallery. And the mechanics are only done to the level of "If you click here the image will be displayed, and between the time you won't be able to click on anything else until the animation is done" so even after I make the new editor (I want to start working on this as soon as I finish the first mechanics of the entire gallery) I would still need to code then how Godot should grab that information, where it should be stored and how it would be accessed and when to let you as a player to open something you should only when it's available to you. 

Anyway, I'm still on step one, designing the Gallery and making it work as it should without any "lock" on any content. First I need to make sure the content can be added to it and that it can be accessed properly.

On the last Development Update, I showed you guys how the character Gallery is working well on those parts, but this month I had some problems with the character gallery. At first, I wanted to do the lazy bastard route, and just export all the images of the characters and categorize them there for you to see BUT, this would mean at least 40 images for EACH character right now, and that would make the project take much longer to load.

So instead I need to make the current code of the game that works in-game to work on the gallery. You know, when you're playing and Wagner shows there for you? Well, I need to grab that piece of code that is made exclusively to work on the main scene of the game and make it work on the gallery, a completely different ambient with different demands. 

Anyway, the code doesn't just show you guys one image, but two instead. One of the head, and one of the body. This way, I can get from 40 images (ten expressions times 4 body clothes) down to 14, 10 images for the expressions on the head and only four images one for each body type. The idea here is: I need to make this to work on the gallery now. To grab the correct set of images and put them together, rescale them to fit on the buttons and then when you click on the button, to show the image as big as possible. That's... not easy.

But as you can see, the best way for the Character Gallery to work would be to compartmentalize the sections. My idea is to create three buttons, one for each of the three main "route" characters, and when clicked on one of those another little menu would be accessible for you as a player to select: What kind of clothes you want to see. Then bellow that ten buttons should appear with the current set you choose.

With this in mind, I had to make some modifications to the current situation of the buttons of the game, to add a "radio" function. You know, those buttons when you select one option the others are un-selected? Well, I was kinda hard-coding them until now (On the save menu, on the configuration menu), but I thought it would work for the better if I changed how the button worked to be native as it is. 

Remember: Godot does have a Radio Button and normal Buttons, but none of those buttons uses a nine-patch rect, a style of a rectangle that can be expanded and shrunk to a minimum value without distorting itself. So, I had to create a special kind of button, and yeah I need to hard code those situations. After I broke the entire code and fixed it with some advice and help from Wagner, the entire button is now able to use the "Radio Function" or a Toggleable Function if I need it. When, as long as the buttons are under the same node parent they will select and unselect each other toggling each one on-off maintaining only one action button. I also applied this new configuration and changed all the code on other areas of the game who used it in a poorly developed way before.

Well, this was what? Two freaking weeks to figure out? But now it works and it means I won't need to do it every time I come to this situation in the future, where a button should toggle on and the others should be toggled off. 

That being said, since I lost almost half the month trying to figure this out, I don't think I'll be able to nail the code for the Character gallery in time, so I will be releasing the next alpha in two or three days, for now, next monday.  I'm just waiting to see if Wagner will be able to finish the last touches on the Map Background. 

This way at least you guys will be able to play and check every background anytime since I won't lock that content away yet. 

Again, thank you all guys for your support and for sticking with me for so long. We'll see each other again after the weekend! 

See you guys.