This Week in the Forest! #167

YO FOLKS! Sorry for the super late update! I’ve been busy and have some friends visiting from out of town. Lots of things have been distracting me from posting, and even now I’m just squeezing one out while I have some down time lmao. So no image prepped, but I can definitely talk about some fun stuff we’ve been up to!

BUT FIRST, let’s start with a word from Vixel!

9/3 weekly update:

Hey floofs, happy new week! <3

Last week I finished nearly all the remaining coding todos for the database upgrades I've been making to TFOL the last couple months! Code throughout the game has now been upgraded to work with our new Conditions and Rules systems which should be a huge improvement for the rest of Act 3 onward. There's a few tidy-up coding todos for me to finish this week, and a TON of playtesting to make sure everything works as expected!

This week I'm also diving back into Act 3 development by adding a new system to make Scarlett hop around; and working on a developer tool for Carrot to enhance his workflow for dialogue writing and portraiting. He's finishing up some assets for the part of Act 3 I'll be working on after that, so the development queue this month is looking pretty lively!

Have a lovely week! <3

OK! On my end I’ve been up to SOME SHIZ. Mainly fucking with the language for TFOL. Here’s the general workflow of how we’ve been handling this.

General Language creating Process!

Step 1 - Friend came up with an awesome way to do a translateable language.

Step 2 - I need to come up with a way to digitize the fonts, so I made it a font.

Step 3 - To make a font, you must find a glyph, and replace it with something. Any letter you see is a “Glyph” in the world of fonts. Imagine a mini canvas that you can resize and put in vector based data. The vector will look like an A - and that will be your A.

Step 4 - We needed to make sure the workflow from how we write the game, to how the language is translated, will be in a method that isn’t too hair-pulling. There isn’t a TON of content in that language, but there’s enough that justifies figuring something out. We’re able to translate English into something that has certain glyphs.

Step 5 - WIth that in mind, I can make a font specifically with those glyphs, and then copy/paste a translation with the font, and BAM! New language! Fully useable workflow!

This took a lot of figuring out, ESPECIALLY BECAUSE OF A FEW SET BACKS. I won’t go into them in detail because that might give stuff away, so I’ll try to be vague but still drop some fun tid bits.

The Unicode Saga! 

One of the biggest tidbits that was messing me up is Unicode. Unicode is the method of accessing alternate glyphs that aren’t on the keyboard. Think any vowel with an accent mark. Or just different symbols, or other language letters. Like Russian letters! All of that can be accessed on a normal keyboard via an ALT+ combo. And the way ANY key/combo works, is that the “a” button doesn’t type “a” - it finds the unicode for what is normally “a” and displays the glyph. For example, you can draw an “o” on the “a” glyph, and everytime you press “a” on the keyboard, it’ll pull up the “a” unicode, which is a customized “o” glyph. Get it xD?

Ok so great, Unicode is a universal library of every glyph that exists.

But here’s the thing, Unicode’s been around forever, and it updates. There are different “editions” if you will, called Unicode Blocks. Like Japanese has its own Unicode block, etc. Not only, but unicode blocks get UPDATED.

So now we’re in a situation where certain glyphs might not be able to be seen because the unicode block for whatever glyph doesn’t exist on what you’re using.

So that begged the question. Where is a unicode block stored? On my program when making a font, you can specifify which unicode blocks to include. So I FIGURED that the unicode information was stored in the font… but I was super wrong. So I thought maybe it was an Operating System thing? But where can i download more… And it turns out you can’t download unicode blocks. I thought it might’ve been like a video/audio codec - but nope!

It turns out, the SOFTWARE has unicode blocks in it. So Microsoft Word was giving me issues displaying certain glyphs. Word Pad displayed a bit more, but not all of them. Obsidian thankfully displays all of them. Telegram display all of them, and I imagine discord does too. THIS TOOK A WHILE TO FIGURE OUT. Quite the fuckin head scratcher.

So lastly the question becomes, does Unity have updated Unicode blocks? And if not, can we HACK IT? Well we haven’t really tested that last part yet, but my fingers are crossed lmao. It’s prolly fine… prolly.

Where the font is at now

So my friend isn’t 100% happy with how all the glyphs are yet, but I’ve gone ahead and put the stand-ins to test the font. It totally works! So whenever Vixel is ready to push forward with Act 3 content, the next lil’ section will feature a bit of the language! :>! Not the final, but definitely the vibe!

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Ok that’s a lot of text and no visuals, so I’ll cut it off here!

Y’all have a good one!