Cards of Gluttony Dev Log #19 [26/10/2024]

Hello everybody, it's that time again! The time for me to tell you all about what I've been up to these past few weeks. Not much to share in the intro today, so let's get right into it!

From the drawing board to the big screen

When I first added the new shirt patterns, there was quite a lot of duplicate copy and pasting going around, namely due to the fact that all of the variants used the exact same sprite for pants: it was only the shirts themselves that changed. This ended up being quite tedious as there was a lot of clutter in all of the image files due to repeating layers and whatnot.

(All of these use the same unaltered bottom sprite duplicated across several dozens of sprites.)

There was also a bit of oddity going on with the fact that the clothing came in a full set: a hard-given combination of pants and a top. When creating new patterns for the shirts, should I keep the pants the same for all of them? Or should match the shirt? But what if someone wanted to match different colors than the one I decided to put in?

This is partly why you haven't seen any new clothing options up until now, I was just very tentative about continuing it in its current form. The solution was quite obvious: I needed to separate the pants and shirt. What started as a bit of a behind-the-scenes fumble led to me expanding an existing system in the game!

The character customization in Cards of Gluttony has always been about indulging me and my penchant for character creators in games.

Originally the game had very limited character customization options: merely setting the colors for the skin tone, hair, iris + whether to have a basic beard sprite on or not. I didn't quite think much about it back then. Just a few simple options for a palette swap, as anything else would be far too much work...

Well I was lying to myself, because a few months later, I later expanded into hairstyle options. I started out with 7 hair options... then I added a bunch more when I added the barbershop to the game... well, at the very least, they only required one single sprite each.

(The 2nd iteration of the character creator! Looks so off and empty compared to now...)

... then I tackled facial features, which needed multiple sprites for each expression the player model can make

... and finally: facial hair options, which were a massive undertaking due to the fact that they needed sprites for every single Wgt stage. But in the end I did it anyways, because again, I just really wanted to make a character creator.

Now that I had to separate the top and the pants, it was time to indulge again:

(Say hello to the new wardrobe menu!)

The pants! The top! They're separate now! And the UI looks completely different too, including a few fancy new buttons..!

I ended up having quite a bit of fun with designing and animating the UI. Up until now, most of the menus in CoG have been fairly static: windows just appear and disappear without as much of an animation.

This was more so due to my lack of knowledge on how properly intertwine visuals and actual code. It's very strange to have to make code pause and wait until a fancy animation is done playing, and surprisingly clunky and unintuitive to code properly too! But as you may have noticed with the Foraging and Gardening minigames, things are slowly starting to improve!

I will likely be revisiting all the old UI slowly over time and updating it one by one to match up with the swanky new animations.

Making the old new

In a way, I just continued on doing more refactoring work like last month. Because this new clothing system needed to replace the old one, I basically took it as a chance to also go through and revamp some of the old clothing code.

Previously the "icon" of the button for each clothing merely used its actual sprite: the one that is displayed on the character model. So the first thing that needed to be done was smaller, more compact and readable icons!

Originally I wanted to avoid having to do this, because I thought it would be too much work to draw unique icons for everything when I could've just used the sprites I already had. Well they didn't end up being that much work in the end all things considered... especially since I had to draw over a dozen sprites for the actual outfit already.

Pattern Palooza

Until now, the game basically recognized each clothing item as its own thing. This included different colors and patterns, meaning they were considered completely unrelated by the code. The shop UI was already looking a little crowded even with the few shirts available in there, so it was about time for something to change... it was time to design a unified system upon which clothing items could be built.

(Look at all the colors! Not the pants though, I haven't gotten to those yet...)

Because of the separation from pants, as well as internal changes that made things much more organized behind the scenes, this allowed me to finally dig into more color variations, namely this T-shirt sprite, which has been following us ever since I first released the game!

This also includes color variations for glasses and hats, which now use the same base structure as clothing. They were originally just a simple text links to the sprite image file. Gross!

But with so many color options now, how does the UI work to make selection as nice and uncluttered as possible?

As you can see, all clothes of the same type are now grouped under one button. You can pretty quickly preview a piece of clothing by hovering over it.

And the color selection? A swanky new pop-up appears after you make your pick that lets you sift through a list of available pattern variants! It uses a similar trick to the Shop UI which spawns the confirmation button right where your mouse is for maximum comfort!

UX design - skipping QoL updates and making it nice to use from the get-go

While designing the new system and its UI, I focused on making it as convenient and comfortable to use. There was one glaring issue at the beginning... the fact that you swap clothes in the game quite frequently. This is, of course, because your clothes can get destroyed in battle.

In the old system, all you had to do was buy the outfit and equip it again. Wasn't too much of a bother. However, now that an outfit consists of two pieces, it would be quite annoying to constantly have to sift through the shop and scroll through all the pants and shirts one by one...

This led to the creation of "Favorites". It's not a particularly ground-breaking feature... it does exactly what it says on the tin: you can freely save and equip various outfit combinations. This basically makes navigating the wardrobe UI exactly the same as it was previously: allowing you to put your clothes on in a single click.

There's still one more tedium left over though: the player would still need to go to the shop to buy the missing pieces. We can use a pretty simple solution for that: let the game automatically buy any missing pieces of your favorite getup. And rather than having to go to the shop to do that every time... why not simply build it into the wardrobe UI?

There! Buying and equipping from the comfort of the wardrobe using one click.

Once this update is out, I'll be on the lookout for any feedback regarding how comfortable it is to navigate the wardrobe UI... but hopefully I covered most of the annoyances I myself ran into while playing around with it!

And what of the actual game?

When I wasn't busy wrestling with the magnificent beast that is my terrible, old code, I finally got some writing progress done on Ikem's next scene. As always, for the sake of not spoiling anything, I will only post a screenshot containing a single line as a teaser:

"I bet you're pretty familiar with these at this point, considering... and if not, well, then I sure hope you know what you signed up for, haha!" - Ikem

I'm pretty proud of the line I decided to share this time. Something you're "pretty familiar with"..? What a mystery! Whatever could he be talking about? Where is this going? Look forward to finding that out once the update is out!

Card of the Month

And to cap things off, it has been a minute since I've done a card of the month, and boy is it a fun one this time! Take a look:

Rampage

At the start of your turn: gain an extra +2 Energy, but a random card is played from your hand (7 turns, 3x activations).

Time for a bit of chaos.

I'm still not quite decided on the aesthetic of it (the name, illustration, flavor text and the "act" that it represents), so that part may change in the future.

An interesting thing to note about how the random card effect works is the fact that it is truly randomized. Regardless of its cost, regardless of any other effects standing in the way... the card that was picked will be played, no matter what. While I originally designed this effect with the intention of making it unhelpful, this particular quirk means it could potentially be used to bypass certain things, such as high cost or statuses that prevent you from playing a card.

This is easily the wackiest card so far... in terms of implementation, at the very least! This ended up becoming part of my refactoring efforts yet again, as the forced card playing effect required me to rewire the battle code in pretty significant ways!

I won't go into details, but the gist of it is: until now, the battle code has been quite inflexible in what it allowed to be done. With this change, the way is paved for cards with more fun or even interactive effects. I haven't completely rewritten the entirety of the code to use the new system, but it's a good first step to build off of on the future!

And that is all!

I don't really have any proper end text to put here, so I'll just end it with the same message as always: thank you for reading and for supporting the project!