Progress Update- UI, updates, and pain (Patreon)

Firstly, I’m going live on Picarto! For the next 4 hours, I’ll be streaming work on the game. If you miss the stream, VODS are also available. ('Videos' tab at the top.)

To new patrons: We’re in the middle of an absurdly-long update cycle. Here’s the summary and how to access content.

What’s being worked on?

Fundamental updates

I made my own branch of the ECS library and updated it to fix some issues that were getting in the way. It was annoying but is done.

Understanding UI

Honestly, this is my eternal kryptonite. UI code feels so ridiculously hard to make work in a sensible way. So I’ve collapsed the MVVM architecture down into a M-VC structure. That mainly just means each UI piece is two parts instead of three now. And I’ve gamed out how to include UI updates and interactions into the ECS pattern.

Trying to make everything too optimized and too modular was a problem. The reality is that some stuff’s gonna be a little messy, but my attitude needs to be: make it work first, then refine later. This week, I’ve figured out the overall pattern that seems like it’ll carry us to victory here.

It’s gotta be optimized to not eat up resources every frame unless it needs to, but not so optimized my brain explodes. Classifying certain kinds of UI as always-active cause that’s the practical reality of them, classifying some as intermittently updating based on user input, and the rest doesn’t change. Weaving those different types into the ECS feels doable.

It’s also gotta be modular enough to keep a consistent code pattern, but not so modular it’s completely useless when there’s some kind of exception to the general design. I’m doing that by making a set of core passive UI objects and their intermittently- or always-active counterparts, based on the existing UI needs. If I need more stuff, I’ll build it when the need actually arises. Aaaaaa-

Tough stuff

Just gonna be candid here.

This week felt like junk. It all felt very slow and challenging. I’m not impressed with the progress and feel like I didn’t meet my own expectations in the way I approached it.

Trying to make UI code gameplay-ready has revealed that I need a different approach to the primary way that data is tracked across the game. I tried to over-optimize it before and now it’s too unwieldy again. I wanted to centralize all the most basic operations where data values are tracked and manipulated into one single system. Before, the problem was that all game mechanics were too fractured to cooperate. Now everything’s fully cooperating, at the cost of functionality. I need to strike a middle ground.

There’s a more common sense approach that I thought I was too smart for, but it turns out I am definitely not. I’m gonna have to go piece by piece through the core systems and implement that approach. It’s really not that big of a task overall, but aaaaaa-

For me, when faced with a problem that requires a lot of complex steps, I struggle with breaking it down into manageable pieces. ADHD brains tend to have this – it’s called executive dysfunction. Sometimes I legit can’t figure out how to pick up an empty box on my floor and throw it out. Other times, I can write my own faux-physics engine and it’s not that big of a deal. The difference in difficulty between the two for me is hard to describe or predict.

I’m plonking away at the code now, and trying to let go of the stress that arises from the executive dysfunction. Stress, in an adhd or any other brain, tends to exacerbate bad habits that make it more difficult to solve the root problem. That’s definitely the case for me. Stress leads to distraction, distraction to self loathing, self loathing to stress.

Bleh.

I’m feeling better than before about this though. Identifying why I’m struggling with the project, and how it’s driving my behavior, has been huge in overcoming difficult code problems like this. I’m pretty optimistic about getting through this task in the next week.

Q&A

When is the next release? When it’s ready. :’(

Can we disable belly bulges? Maybe. There’s a practical limitation there with how big the toys are, but this has been requested a lot so I wanna look into it when I’m doing rig work again. I’d like to accommodate this, even though I love bulging >.>

Pregnancy? Oh yeah, I’ve got ideas. No promises on when, but the idea is on the list.

More extreme kinks involving harm? Mmm I’m probably not going too extreme in that direction. I’m not too interested in exploring them myself. It may be something that can be explored in custom content in future projects, which I want to be much more focused on user-created stuff.

That’s all for now!

I appreciate words of encouragement, but I wanna make sure y’all know I’m not talking about my difficulties to fish for support. It’s because I think it’s interesting and helpful to others to see the realities of working on a long term project like this. Sometimes the challenges are skill-based, sometimes mental, sometimes emotional. Overcoming them is part of the path toward succeeding at the project.

Thank you all so much for following this bizarre project. I’ll keep doing my best to finish the damn thing.

<3