3 Months in!

I'd say a lot of the core mechanics of being able to move, sell, merge, and expire items are functional - though they could use a lot of tweaking and cleaning. Movement doesn't have to be fighting-game nice, but it shouldn't feel annoying (even if moving freight maybe should feel a bit clunky.)

Next steps are refactoring and... NPC complexity!! I've been hella excited for this. I generally want NPCs to do... more in games. I played a decent amount of pre-Stardew Valley farming sim, so I probably have high standards.

I got to do a little editor while brushing up on React because I need to. Decided to do this after being utterly incompetent at writing my own placeholder dialogue because I can't remember my own tags/item names.

Interface of a custom JSON dialogue editor

I did manage to upload the game on itch this month. Then I hid it behind a password. 3/5 of the areas having music, while the other two were quiet, didn't feel right. It wasn't supposed to even have music, but it felt more unfinished that way.

Speaking of dialogue, cutscene engines are not fun. I imagined something like RPGmaker's system since that's what I started learning gamedev on. But... actually doing that myself took a lot of time. Enough that only one cutscene made it in this month, and I'm going to toss most of it due to other characters developing.

Lastly, I've gotten all the assets down in the game to a nice palette of colors. Went from 143 to 88 colors! I do not think anybody will notice but me, but it makes me very happy. I wish I took pics of the color differences, but I was somewhat interrupted with getting off instagram and onto cara.

Tags: Peddlers Between Pulsars