This past week we mostly focused on ironing out small things in the game, and fixing the issues with girls' sprites that accumulated over the development time. Some of them were easy to fix, like slight inconsistencies or mistakes in line or color. Some of them were bigger, like girls not being able to wear shirts without skirts. But most of those issues are being addressed.

Before:

Now:

Fixing sprites also had me returning to the Dressing Room code, which is a horror to behold. And even more difficult to maintain. I tried optimizing and fixing it, but even Grok, who finally managed to optimize my calendar code, can’t even begin to figure out how to make this room work without breaking it completely. The issue is with how I wanted to organize the room. The same button can work differently depending on what the girl has on right now. For example, the "Shirt" button: if the girl is wearing anything but the shirt, like a vest or a completely different piece of clothing (or nothing at all for that matter) - the button should switch to a plain shirt sprite. But if the girl is wearing only a shirt - it should remove the shirt instead. But what to do when you put on the tie? It would be strange if the tie would be considered an important piece of clothing, so the button should just remove the shirt and the tie in that case. But since the tie cannot be worn without a shirt, I need to put on a shirt if the tie is selected when the shirt is not worn (and keep track of it), but if the tie is selected when the vest is on, which cannot be worn without a shirt too, I need to keep track that the tie is on, but that there is still clothes on top of the shirt, so the button should only remove the vest and tie. Confused yet? Because I am. I might've even made a mistake in this explanation somewhere.

Thankfully, when I code, I can kind of "trial and error" my way through it, but the Dressing room is quickly becoming the most logic intense part of the game, quickly replacing the Trial of Mind. Hopefully, as the time goes on and I fix the mistakes in the code and maybe find a way to optimize it a bit (or maybe if LLMs become smarter yet, and will be able to rework the code), but for now, I dread the time when the girls will have more than two main outfits.

Returning to the older sprites threw a curveball into Shady Two's workflow too. Since we're both working on our "secondary" workstations right now, a lot of things are not set up as they used to. So we ran into a problem where color profiles were not matching between the files, Shady Two's tablet, and my laptop. It took us a few hours to fix everything without ruining the files, and for a moment there it actually felt like everything was lost, and the sprites would either need to be recolored or we should wait until we get our hands back unto our primary gear who-knows-when. But thankfully, we managed to find a solution and you won't see Elizabeth's sickly color-shifted sprite.

Well, I guess that's it for today. I hope it wasn't too confusing to read this entry. I'll see you in the next one.

Shady Character One, out!