Howdy Architects! Another month (and another year!) done. December was a bit slow, due to family recovering from the flu (this took two weeks — everyone apparently decided to get it a few days apart), wrapping up work, and general Christmas and New Years festivities. Thankfully, quite a bit got done, so let’s dive in.
December was mostly about bug fixes. I’m looking at the source control log and seeing a lot of “Fixing” or “Fixed.” If you follow Steam notes, they’re there too, but I’m seeing no fewer than 100 bug fixes. These range from minor issues with user interfaces not updating or showing the wrong summary, to issues with how pathfinding was working and comparing height differentials. I finally managed to get tile-based movement to work more nicely with walking animations (such that they don’t reset between steps) as well!
But who cares about bug fixes? You want to know about features! Let’s get into those!
Last month, I added a Text Entry user interface type, but there wasn’t really anything you could do, aside from collect it in a Variable. Naming a character <gv[1]> and updating global variable 1 is not super useful, is it? Enter the “Change Name” command.
Change Name will take a Unique ID, which could be a Hero, could be a Battler/Enemy, Equipment, maybe even an Item? — and then allow you to set a Name, via a value or a variable. If you can get the Unique ID and it has a name, generally, you can change it. This will allow us to finish the workflow of “Name your Character.” To support this and update things, it required me to accidentally (sorry) break saved games — which has since been remedied. We’re well on our way at this point!
I also added “Shrinkwrapping” to Messages now, which works very similarly to how it does in Dialogues. You have the ability to contract certain elements in a Message Box (e.g. the “Header” where you show a character’s name) such that they fit to the size desired. It’s very similar to Dialogues.
Battle Backgrounds now support the ability to specify directions that Battlers will face. In the above, you’ll see that the Enemy selected will now face “South.” If you don’t care or don’t want to set it, simply delete the value there.
“ItemTypeName” was added to numerous places to help you find the name of the Item Type attached to an Item when using Templates. Additionally, “SkillTypeName” was also added to Skills in a similar fashion. This should help you do more “interesting” things if you wanted to show something like “Black Magic” as the name of a Skill Type, if you had something like a “Fire” spell.
Numerous updates were made to physics to work with the concept of platformers. It’s still not perfect, but it’s a lot better and probably the best it’ll be for a while. If you’ve been following for a while, you know that we have a “2D Platformer” series of tutorials on YouTube now! I think there were something like eight considered — we’ll see how far we get. ShadowsInTime has been carrying the proverbial boat on this one, thank you so much!
The big update for December is one you haven’t or won’t see for just a little while. The big focus has been on building an automated way to capture and create documentation that we’ll use in our Wiki (Grav). It’s far from perfect, but I built out a structure that allows us to create and build documentation very quickly. Rather than spending hours “hoping” I have things written out correctly, the new system will actually generate a compact database and let me know when things change (which then means that I need to go to the Wiki and update the documents — which also get automatically generated).
Hopefully, this will allow 1.0 to come a bit faster, as the documentation can be streamlined. I have an “intern” working on writing the different adapters and doing some of the busy work on these (while also teaching him some tricks). This has freed me up to try to solve everyone’s issues and try to keep chugging ahead forward. There are roughly 20-ish sections to build documentation on. If I wrote these myself, I could do two to three a day. Add another day in for copy to double check that the details “look” OK (and/or recommend corrections). We’d be able to knock out documentation in more-or-less a month. Because it’s a good exercise, I’m letting my helper suffer through writing the adapters to become a better programmer, so y’all will be waiting. I anticipate that documentation will more-or-less be finalized and ready by March of 2026.
So, where does that put us for 1.0?
I have a very basic game setup for the “Dungeon Crawler” project and a map or two. I’ve been working on a Game Design Document, mapping out the world’s interactions, dialogues, character connections, concepts, and all the like. If everyone else can keep up, we might be “ready” as soon as July of 2026, with optimal conditions. Is that likely to happen? Probably not. We will exit Early Access by the end of next year. A more accurate estimate is probably going to be between Q3 and Q4 of 2026, which puts us probably in a September to October timeframe. Most of the “feature” work is slowing down at this point (until I come up with other ideas and toss the schedule out the window), so it’s mostly on working on the content.
Thank you for a wonderful 2025, Architects! I’m very excited for 2026 — the year we enter 1.0!
As always:
Thank you so much for your support so far. I’m looking forward to building this community further and giving you the engine you may not have known you always wanted!
