Progress Report

Greetings, everyone!

Holy moly! This past week has been almost absurdly productive, and I'm on an incredible roll. Let's start from the top and work through everything, shall we?

First, the deck builder is now functionally complete, and I could release it in its current state with few complaints. Its worst part is the deck selector before you even enter the editor since it is just a simple Ren'py menu right now. Still, I expect to improve that before release. The editor itself can be seen in the above screenshot. If you read last week's progress report, you can compare the screenshot from back then to this one to see how much has happened. But here is an overview of what's new:

The deck on the right side of the screen is now fully implemented. At the top is the deck's name, which can be changed at will using the edit button to the right. Below that is an alphabetically sorted list of the cards in your deck and the number of copies of each. For example, we can see here that my test deck has three copies of the Camera Adjustments card and one copy of Capture Her Beauty. By the way, this is the deck you played with back in 1.1, so if it seems familiar, that's why. This list is scrollable in case you add so many different cards that they won't fit inside this frame, and you can see the scrollbar for this eventuality to the right. 

Below the scrollbar, you can find two buttons. One is for copying your current deck to the clipboard for easy online sharing. One fun thing about card games like these is to tell people about your awesome deck concepts and get feedback, and this button will make that process much smoother. The other button takes you to the Preferences screen, a valuable feature for Android users in particular.

Below that, again, is some basic information about requirements that must be fulfilled before you can save your deck. The save button is greyed out until these are satisfied. Currently, you must have exactly 34 cards in your deck (remember, the model will add 4 cards of her own later). You must also have a minimum of three first-level Engine cards. This protects you against making unwinnable decks and makes it slightly easier to grasp what you must focus on for your first deck.

Finally, the Save and Cancel buttons. No matter how much you mess around on this screen, the changes are only saved if you click Save, and you can only click Save if you have a valid deck and there are unsaved changes to begin with.

Other new things on this screen include a brand new symbol for Usable Heat, which you can see on the Ready When You Are and This Is Fine cards. This symbol will probably get adjusted somewhat before release. Several old cards have also had their artwork updated to be of higher fidelity while retaining the old style. This is due to advancements in the AI technology available to me since I originally designed these cards.

Also, note the scrollbar to the immediate right of the cards. See how small the highlighted part is? Yeah, that's because I've added a massive amount of new cards already, and I'm far from done. Version 1.1 contained 24 cards, 4 of which were Model cards. As of right now, 2.0 contains 60 cards. Rest assured, you will have plenty of fun toys to play around with and an almost endless amount of deck variety. I will post previews of some of these cards over the coming weeks. It's worth mentioning that while I might have added the cards already, many of them have not had their game effects implemented yet, and most still lack artwork. My first priority is to get a complete overview of what this update will encompass.

Much of my increased productivity can be attributed to AI assistance, and I'm not ashamed to admit it. ChatGPT 4 and Github Copilot have been tremendously helpful to me, helping with everything from commenting code to writing entirely new functionality. Of particular note is the code for particle systems.

Oh, you thought we were done with the updates where we talked about particle systems, did you? Think again.

If you've been around for a while, you may remember that I spent much time and effort making a functioning particle system engine for Ren'py and succeeded. The problem with the implementation I created back then was that the code was confusing, hard to follow, undocumented, and extremely difficult to expand and extend. I showed this code to ChatGPT 4 yesterday and discussed my implementation with the AI. While it couldn't see any bugs or issues, it nonetheless struggled to answer specific questions about how to do things like have particles stay on the screen longer. That didn't surprise me, as I couldn't honestly answer the question myself.

Instead, I told ChatGPT 4 to keep the existing code in mind and offer an alternative take. The result was marvelous, though it took a lot of discussions back and forth between us, with both the AI and myself offering suggestions and improvements until we landed at a brand new implementation for Supermodel's particle systems that is infinitely more readable and vastly easier to expand. In fact, I immediately added some functionality that I missed in the previous implementation (random deviations in particle starting positions, in case you're curious). I'm in the middle of updating all the old effect calls to point to the new particle engine, and once that's done, I will eliminate the old one altogether. This will be an excellent help for Supermodel in the future and should make it much, much easier for me to add new graphical effects as we move forward. 

Anyway, this update has gone on long enough. I'm itching to get back to work, which pleases me to no end. Not all game development includes surfing on a "developer high" like this, so I'll enjoy it while I can.

Supermodel Snapshot 2.0 is inching ever closer, and I can't wait to see people mess around with it.

Until next time!