(devlog) Slow

Hello again. It's been a few months since my last update, and truthfully I don't have all that much to share. The world's been in a bit of a weird state, my own personal life included. It's been a challenge just to keep myself grounded and not get overwhelmed with everything going on.

I've spent the past few months sitting at this desk wondering if I should just scrap my projects altogether. Seeing them incomplete is a bummer, and not at all what I wanted. But every time I try to focus on them, I draw a blank. It's as if my mind is shying away from it. It's really frustrating.

Anywho, yesterday I managed to grab a cup of coffee and sit down determined to get something done, and I'm happy to say that progress, albeit small, has been made.

• I've created a new, responsive UI that should be a bit cleaner than the first one, both front-end and back-end.
• I've scrapped the full-image backgrounds for a header image that'll display the current scene; I did like the previous scene style, but it felt busy. I may add a toggle to switch it back to the original style, but that's up in the air for right now.
• The map system has been canned as it was a terrible jumbled mess of spaghetti code. I absolutely dreaded working with it as it flew in the face of the passages system (tile movement did not progress the passage, it simply changed the contents displayed). I'm toying with a few different ideas, such a a region/world map overlay that you can select key locations to visit, or a breadcrumb system that will allow you to nav back to larger regions and then progress to a different area. Again, it's up in the air, but anything will be better than the old map.
• The portrait block will now double as the character block. You'll be able to upload a picture there if you'd like, to represent your character. As a long-term goal, I'd like to include a paper doll system that'll display your character as it appears in the text description.
• The game is being built with mobile platforms in mind as well this time. I can't say much about pushing to iOS (since Apple's super strict about what can be on their store and they don't like unverified apps), but Android APK's should be easy to build for. The current layout design is responsive and can fit just about any screen size (at least from what I've tested) and I'm going to include a text size setting that you can adjust to make everything readable on your device.

That's about it for now. A quick reminder that the Atlas itch.io store page is where I'll always be publishing these blog posts, so you need only check here for updates. No ETA on the next Atlas release, but I haven't given up yet.

Much love, homies.
- Autus