SPECIAL THANKS TO THE GOAT @LEGENDS_SERIES FOR THE COVER PICTURE.

I'm really excited as I fully coded out two concepts that I had thought of, and they both went very well with minor hitches. If they did see any problems, I quite literally left the house, played basketball, came back and fixed it. 

Designing the Inventory was a cake-walk, but I knew the actual user inputs and handling was going to be the major issue. However, it seems to have went very well. I initially used Unity buttons, but I forget how much I hate em. So, I made my own buttons, to work with instead. They might no be as streamlined but I understand them inside and out, compared to the unity buttons.

This is the first time that I applied something major that I learned in college. My workaround for saving the data was to generate a text file, using the IO Stream namespace. This will hold formatted data that is parsed from the game's code. For example, there are fifteen slots available in the inventory. Each item has an ID that is retrieved as well. Both information is then formatted like this.

{slot index:item id}

{0:1}

Using substrings, I was able to obtain the numbers that I needed to then parse into integers. Upon reloading the game your inventory will be empty, but upon loading your save file, the game will read each line and get the slot index and the item that belongs in the respective index. To be honest, I still get giddy thinking about it, because I feel like such a genius for coming up with this with very little online help. 

I also worked on more enemy AI alongside the Inventory. Coding artificial intelligence is so much fun. I love seeing what kind of cool combinations the AI comes up with to try and kill the player. At the same time, I've learned that it is extremely important to balance the dynamic between the player and the enemy. The enemy is very elementary in what it can do, but it's options are deadly, and without the right timing and patience, you can easily die. I want these enemies to be hard to deal with, but once you learn them, they are fun to fight and easy to handle.

I don't think this is enough progress to warrant saying 0.9, but as soon as I finalize the necessary scripts and aspects that I will be reusing, I can imagine that the rest of the game's development down will boil down to drawing assets, coding more AI, balancing and cleanups. Overall, I am very happy with my progress, and I'm not going to lie game development in general might become a new hobby for me. I've been brainstorming ideas for future games and might get started on them soon. 

So, not relating to the game, I've been reading a lot of Visual Novel's recently. I dipped my toe into the medium with Umineko and Saya no Uta, but now I am currently on what feels like the end-game of Muv-Luv Alternative, and just getting started with the 2nd Episode of Subarashiki Hibi. To be so honest, Alternative is peak. I've already decided that I'm doing a cover on me YouTube or something for this masterpiece. Subahibi is very interesting to say the least. I can understand why some say it's a masterpiece, but at the same time I feel dumb sometimes reading it. I wonder if I needed any prerequisites before coming into this, but eh whatever. We ball.

Thanks for reading, and as usual it's plugging time.

Check out the Soundtrack if you'd like! - https://1itsme-null.bandcamp.com/album/dawn-of-the-knight-demo

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December 13th 2020 - [DEMO RELEASED]

May 16th, 2021 - [VERSION 0.2 COMPLETED]

April 19th, 2022 - [VERSION 0.3  COMPLETED]

June 18th, 2022 - [VERSION 0.4 COMPLETED]

August 13th, 2022 - [VERSION 0.5 COMPLETED]

September 12th, 2022 - [VERSION 0.6 COMPLETED]

January 30th, 2023 - [VERSION 0.7 COMPLETED]

May 16th 2023 - [NEW DEMO RELEASED // VERSION 0.8 COMPLETED]

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