Posted June 04, 2025 by Kirijo
(Abby) Hello interactive media interactors. It is I, Abby Yaffe. This month has been a bit of a haze. I think most of my brain has been going to onboarding Katie and also looking for a new place to live. Fun fact: I’ve found a pretty cool new place to live. My girlfriend even approves of it, and she has not approved of previous places I’ve looked at, so I’m vibing. Have been on so many condo tours. Blech. But we are Probably Finished Looking. Katie only has a say in where I live because its also going to be her office.
You’d never guess what I’ve been working on. It rhymes with Baction Belection Benu… the Action Selection Menu! I fucking hate this thing! It literally has infinite bugs, it will never not have bugs. I need to write out like an entire fucking narrative schematic for its behaviour or something, but I probably won’t. Recently, specifically what I’ve been doing with it: fixing yellow flickering player “click me!” signification bugs. There are still bugs I need to fix in relation to actions not stopping flickering for one creature when said action is previously selected for another creature. Idk its a whole thing. I just need to take some time to write down all the ways I want it to work where it isn’t currently working but I just don’t have the fucks to give about it right now. Hopefully some day the fucks to give will return and the world will be at peace.
I also this month implemented the new CreatureInfoPanel UI. We were trying to make it look brain-y, as it only appears when the player is zoomed in and the vignette is strong. We want it to feel like a UI element where the player is looking at information on the inside of their brain, as they are only accessing this information through psychic means. It needs a bit more work but is good for now, it gets the point and information across.
(Katie)I'm excited to be writing my first devlog entry!
I've been doing what all engineers do in their first weeks of work: spending a lot of time trying to understand the codebase. It's actually pretty readable, especially considering Abby has been coding a complex simulation game in blueprints entirely by herself for two and a half years. Eventually I'll think about some larger refactors (especially once we start thinking about networking, oof), but for now we just want it to be presentable. Our main deadline coming up is our Indiecade video submission (which I assume Abby talked about up top), so I was tasked with playing through the campaign and fixing any bugs that impeded progression.
In addition to engineering I'm also helping out with some production work. My last job was on very short development cycles, so I have a lot of experience with scheduling tasks, managing deadlines, and working with milestones. Organizing priorities and backlog tasks is actually pretty interesting, and it's been fun to think about how to create structure without introducing bureaucracy and ~meetings~.
I'm looking forward to implementing some larger features soon!