#Mercantile update: Refactored my inventory system. Boring but necessary

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Iterating iterating iterating... Got things connected to the game data now too.

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Got a basic layout created for my contractor details modal tonight. Lots of placeholder assets as you can see, shoutout to "wulax" on OpenGameArt.org for the placeholder character sprite.

I did this directly in Godot, but nothing really works yet, just lots and lots of UI controls :P

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I really need to come up with a different font for #Mercantile ... I've seen SO many indie games using Alagard now. I can't blame them, it really is a phenomenal font. But I think I would still like to be a bit more unique. #gamedev

Stiiill noodling. I just can’t seem to get quite the right “feel” that I’m looking for for these. Might have to end up picking the “least bad” option and going with that.

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Decided to go a little wild with my tooltips for #Mercantile. Not done yet, but have some flat colours in. Man, hand animating things is hard work! Done in #Procreate.

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For #ScreenshotSaturday this week, I'm gonna post a video so I can showcase some of the new key art I've finished this week, as well as some of the AWESOME new music from @musicvsartstuff!!! 🤩

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Well. I was aiming for knocking one (1) of my tasks off of my #Mercantile “Next Demo Milestone” list. Instead, I managed to do 2 (and a half)! Feels good.

I also have tested and compared the sRGB -> 256 colour conversion process between #Aseprite, #Photoshop, and #GIMP. Sadly, Photoshop was the clear winner here. The dithering was a notch above, giving much cleaner results. Guess I’ll have to use that from now on.

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Yooo I got the first demo back from @musicvsartstuff of the #Mercantile music and it is super great! I am so stoked right now. 😁

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Just commissioned some music for #Mercantile (well, I DMed the musician hehe) -- very excited!

I won't say more until things are more finalized, but it will be very good I'm quite sure :)

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Got started on the dialogue system for #Mercantile tonight, opted to go for a package from the Godot Asset Library rather than rolling my own.

Dialogue Manager: https://godotengine.org/asset-library/asset/1207

So far it seems quite nice and easy to use (and customize), I've got a fair chunk of stuff in there already and it's working like a charm.

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I was curious, so I did a bit of checking on #Mercantile in Godot’s profiler. I wasn’t expecting anything crazy since it’s been running nice and smooth from the start.

Turns out I’ve got TONS of room to grow- average frame times were hovering around 1ms. 😊

Trying a different direction for my contractor portraits, but decided to treat it as an art exercise. Haven’t tried scaling this down yet, we’ll see how it goes. If it works, this will be one of the mages. If it doesn’t work, oh well- I enjoyed the process, and it’s good to get in some portrait practice. Done from reference, in Procreate.

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Gasp -- I actually have something for #ScreenshotSaturday this week!

Things with #Mercantile are coming along quite nicely, still lots to do and lots subject to iteration, but progress is being made! There's a new village map, and graphics exist (in varying stages of completion)!

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Been playing around today with how I'm going to approach the contractor's portraits. Not totally settled on this yet, but I think it looks decent. Probably could do a bit more manual tweaking to the 256 colour version.

Image 1: sRGB
Image 2: Converted to Windows 8-bit (256) Color with some manual edits.

The originals are 64px square, and I actually painted them at that size — which was surprisingly fun! Blown up to 512px for posting.

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Spending a bit of time in #Miro, organizing some of my reference imagery for #Mercantile. I don’t absolutely love Miro so far, but it seems better than the alternatives I’ve tried for this purpose. Certainly beats digging through my camera roll, hehe.

Oh shit!

Yesterday, something shitty happened to my Procreate file for my village map. I still have it in full res, but I lost all my layers. Was pretty choked about that last night.

I decided to take it as a sign to try something different, and I've just tested out something new and... it works really well. Like REALLY well. Hopefully I don't jinx it, but this could be a serious upgrade when all is said and done.

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Made some progress on my village map, as you can see I've still got a bit to do but it's coming along. The conversion to 256 colours is actually doing me a lot of favours here, so I'm happy about that.

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So I rolled back my project to before my ridiculous UI bug from last night, and then painstakingly did everything again, carefully testing and committing after each step. And it works this time! No problems whatsoever! I'm happy but also... wtf. 🙃

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Ugghhh I don't know how but somehow I blew up most of my UI... Shit's somehow automatically scaling to like double the screen size when I hit play. I've double and triple checked everything including the parent controls... Absolutely stumped.

Gonna have to roll back and undo all my other changes from tonight I think T_T

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