Aboo | DevLog 05

Haven’t posted in a while... A lot of things happened during this time — mostly not the good kind. There’s not as much time for my personal project as I’d like — but I haven’t given up on it!

So, let’s begin...

Back to the first location... again

First, I tried moving the project to the almighty Unity. I managed to move all the gameplay without any problems. But when it came to UI and the new Input system... after poking around their API for a bit, I realized — once again — I was wasting my time. So I went back to buggy Godot (which, by the way, hasn’t crashed even once so far).

Second, I rewrote the entire project structure. At first I was super happy with signals — until there were too many. It all became a mess. And since I don’t work on this every day, I kept forgetting how things worked. So… I threw out all my custom signals.

Simplified level loading, removed saving for now, and tried to make everything as clean and consistent as possible — no extra dependencies. Of course, it’s still not perfect. And let’s be honest — in a month or two, I’ll probably rewrite it again.

My little flowchart — super helpful, actually

Third — I finally made my own dialogue editor! Wrote it from scratch. Three times. Now it’s almost perfect — meaning it covers everything I need for this project. It even supports non-linear dialogues, choices, and all that fun stuff.

Dialogue editor — version 3

Dialogue in-game — response options

This task was hard for me — but also super interesting. I learned a lot. Still thinking about a localization editor... I really don’t like filling everything in via tables. Maybe later. I’ll leave translation stuff for the end anyway.

Fourth — I added some helper tools. A quick-travel system between locations, and a database view of all variables. (Still need to add editing for that one.)

Map (not in the game) for teleporting between levels

Right now I decided to take a break from coding and focus on story, characters, and polishing the first few locations and dialogues. Basically, I just want to finally put a small part of the game together — and actually play it.

Location in progress...

If anyone’s interested, I can explain how the dialogue editor works. We’ll laugh together at my spaghetti code =D Also thinking about recording a timelapse of me drawing a location or an item...

See you next week... or month... or... who knows.

Originally written in 2020 — just keeping the spirit.
The original Russian version is here: Gamin.me — Как сделать маленькую игру (часть 5)