Code Rewrites (August 01 2025)

I kept working on the tower level, and I'm a bit stuck at the ending right now. For the ending I wanted you to unlock a way to make it easier (but still with a few restrictions) to get boxes past the tower. I tried several things, but decided on having bounce blocks that will send the box to the top of the tower (where it will get bounced away again). Now the question is, what unlocks those new bounce blocks, and then what to do with all the boxes you get access too.

Another thing I did was change how switches work. The tower level really wanted it where multiple switches had to be activated at the same time in order to deactivate/activate a platform. The problem is this was basically impossible to do with the switches as is. I instead rewrote the game where the player object would first find every switch in the level, and keep a list of what objects those switches interact with. Then for each object, it checks whether any switches that interact with that object are on or off.

Anyways, I've been working on this one level for a while now, and I think maybe it'd be better if I take a bit of time away from it. Instead maybe I can try to make a level based around the bullets I programmed earlier. It's possible I have to change the way the player holds boxes in order to more effectively use boxes as a shield against the bullets.

Finally I discovered a new innovation. Originally when you're given text buttons in my digital card games, that's that, they were just text. When you click one of those buttons, the player receives a number and then figures out what to do from there. It mostly worked, except there were some tricky cases that could happen when some buttons need a condition in order to show up. I now changed that system where when a button is created, it gets sent both text and also what will happen when the button is clicked. It's more direct and accurate this way.

Tower Level (July 25 2025)

I've finally done with changing Randomly Generated RPG to support translations. It has over 750 lines, which surely isn't much compared to really large / more story-based games, but it's definitely the most out of any game I've translated so far. In comparison, Relentless Waves and the platforming game are under 40 lines (and I doubt the platformer is going to get many more lines).

Another thing about the platformer is that there isn't even much code for it. Which in a way makes it a great first try at test cases, since I don't need too many of them. What this means though is that most of the work remaining is just on me, making new levels. Currently I'm not on pace to finish the game before August, and now the goal is instead mid-August.

Currently I'm still working on level 5. I have a cool idea, although it has nothing to do with the bullets I created earlier. Instead there is a tower in the middle of the level, and while it's easy to move yourself between both sides of the tower, moving boxes is trickier, as it's surrounded by purple barriers. The tower itself is a column of upwards arrows that launch a box upwards, and then at the top there is either a rightwards arrow or a leftwards arrow. Except what arrow is there is determined by a button. I still don't know what the player is doing yet in the level, but the goal will be to constantly move boxes between the 2 sides of the tower.

The mysterious online game is still taking up a ton of my time. I've had to work on it every day for a while now, and while it is fun I would like to calm down on it. Time spent on it is time not spent on the platformer. However if I had to guess it's still going to be like one or two weeks before I can finally stop having to put time into it every single day.

Finally here's a new song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TdZNsRqM_cY

Translating Randomly Generated RPG (July 18 2025)

I somehow have done zero work on the platforming game this week. This is because I instead spent the time setting up the translation code for Randomly Generated RPG. This process requires finding every bit of text in the game, and putting it into a spreadsheet. For both puzzle games I'm working on, I've been putting text into spreadsheets since the beginning. But for Randomly Generated RPG I didn't do that. And unlike something like Relentless Waves, there is a ton of text in this game, which includes the menus and the log and character abilities.

Another tricky part is that the game's uses a lot of variables, things like "[character] takes [number] damage." This mean the translations also have to take this into account. In the translation spreadsheet, everything is written as "$This$ takes $Num$ damage," and the plan is that if someone was translating this game into a different language, they still have to keep "$Num$", because the code searches for $Num$ to replace with a number.

The spreadsheets says there are over 600 lines of text, and 400 of that is the abilities. To speed up the process, I wrote a google apps script to take existing text from the ability spreadsheet, and organize all of them into the translation sheet. If I did all of that manually it would've taken me many hours; instead it just took a few minutes.

Anyways I'm getting close but I'm still not quite done. And since I've been doing this only this for a week I have nothing else to say for this week.