AQ project status update

 Hey, so for this week, I haven't worked on the microbe survivors game since the alpha update. I mean, not that I haven't done research on how I can make things work and perform better, but I haven't done any actual development on it. Instead I went about refactoring my old Adventure Quest clone project. The thing that got me stuck and shelve it before was figuring out animations, but truthfully there's a lot more things that can be improved before then.

Starting with the save files, at first I had been saving and loading resource files to the player's save directory, but the problem there is that when godot loads the resource, it can execute code within the file, so bad actors could share a "save" file and people would unwittingly be executing malicious code when they load the game. It's extremely unlikely that would ever happen for my project, like I'd probably have a better chance of personally winning the mega millions lottery, but it's good practice to just nip that in the bud. So instead I switched everything over to using encrypted config files to save and load player data, and thankfully that's been pretty painless. The next thing I was going to work on was planning out a baseline for player progression to balance against, because I'd like to generate enemies around the player's level, but I am definitely not going to be hand crafting thousands of enemy resources for the player to encounter at any given level. Instead I'm working on just making templates for enemies, that just contain their appearance, name, description, and then some simple base stats, and then have a helper script generate enemy stats scaled to the player's level and modified by the expected difficulty of the encounter. It'll still be a lot of templates to make, but it's the difference between making a generic slime once and making the same slime with stats for levels 1-99, as an example.

Another thing I want to work on is some kind of interaction system outside of battles, basically just sort of being able to navigate the town, talk to characters with the dialogue boxes, that sort of stuff. I have no idea how to implement it in Godot, because I've never really worked with any form of dialogue before. My experience is almost exclusively in creating gameplay mechanics, so it's yet another brand new thing I'll need to learn to a functional level, but it's a fun process so that's okay.

I didn't actually expect to come back to this for a while, but it's sort of refreshing after burying my head in a 2D bullet hell. I'll try my best to split my attention between the two though, I feel somewhat obligated to keep up with microbe survivors since we're planning to take it to steam, but the AQ clone (henceforth AQC until I reveal my project name for it) is like my passion project. It gets pretty overwhelming looking at all the lines of code I've had to write for it, but that just makes me more invested in bringing it to completion, that's a lot of time I've already put into it. And the type of game was a huge part of my formative childhood, it brings me back to simpler times and I just want to recapture that feeling with my own work.

Until next week.