So I've been a bit silent, and I didn't follow through with my intention to write on the geomancy redesign.

All is good. The new system is less impressive as it is, but it'll get a real opportunity to shine soon, 'cos I'm working on local PVP. 

The game wasn't designed with PVP in mind at all, both in code and UX design. So there's a lot of refactoring going on.

UI

I've been forced to tinker a lot with the UI to make space for displaying both teams in their entirety. In the end, I took the simplest, shortest route. Simple is good when it comes to UI.

Oh: and I finally changed the font from the horribly basic Arial. I'm not sure I'll stick with this one new font, but it's a step forward anyway.

Art

I've been working a lot on illustration, basicaly doing concepts, learning Krita and developing basic animation muscles. Most of it is still top secret, though!

Code

It's a good experience to revisit ancient code. Most of these lines were written on my very first few days coding, back in 2022. I've advanced a lot since them. Feels like walking amidst stone age ruins.

My original architecture was heavily centralized and made little to no use of the OOP capabilities of C#. "HudControl" was a mothership which handled basically everything the player could interact with. Stuff was so coupled together we could call it an orgy. (Now I'm doing fancy things such as creating, you know, abstract classes and other classy stuff. Things the cool kids on the block 've been doing for a while)

I've been slowing chipping away parts of the HudControl, delegating behaviors to be handled by game objects themselves (such as panels and menus). PVP is compelling me to radicalize that approach.

I don't know how much neatness I REALLY need in this code tho. It's a learning opportunity,  and it feels refreshing to straighten the legacy macarroni - but it would be nice too to actually release the goddamn game someday instead of playing perfectionist. I mean, Toby fox made it with every dialogue in the game contained in a single if/else fork.

 Will it run?

I'm doing this entire refactor wild-west-style. No testing until the whole thing is functional. I'm rebuilding most of the HudControl and it better damn work when it's done. Obviously it'll probably fizzle the first time I hit "play" and it then it's bug hunting season. But in the end of the day, it's just moving things around in a HUD and collecting inputs. It is not that complicated. It will run.