Of Dragon Con, Debug Overlay, and Localization

Today I'm "working" at Dragon Con. By "working" I mean manning a track room, making sure the panelists and audience are having a great time. Luckily, there's a lot of downtime while I'm here, so I brought my laptop with me and I've been diligently working on the game during the downtime. I actually stood outside the door in the hallway with my laptop in my hands working on the game while telling attendees we were at capacity and they couldn't come in.

I started by jumping into a little bit of the localization work. So far this has only been setup of my localization string tables. I've added some keys and made sure they're all following the same standard. There's even some English source text in there. As I've been doing this localization work I have found other things I need to fix or change though. Like the case for the IDs on my buffs is not what I want. I'm also going to need to add a new resource definition for the data manager to load for cutscenes. Right now they're all built into the individual cutscenes, but I can completely change the way I'm doing cutscenes if I just break the definition out into a resource and call that.

But, I stepped back and decided I wanted to finally add a bit of functionality to my debug overlay. So I began digging into Expressions in Godot. And with a little help from Gemini, I was able to add a simple command console and it works! There were a few stumbles, like I was using _input() for some stuff, but I needed to instead use _unhandled_input() and it was all good.

It's great now because I can directly access my internal systems with simple commands to test without having to assign them to specific things. This will also serve as a "cheat mode" for players when there's actually a game to play. It's a win-win! It may not look the best but it's functional, which is what really matters. Make it work first, you can make it pretty later.

I've still got hours more work today though, so I'll be making more progress. I'm not sure if I'll update this with other progress or if I'll make a whole new post. I'll probably just work on things and not bother writing any more out though. I'm excited by my game still, and so motivated to keep going. Usually, by this point, my project is so complex that it gets overwhelming but for some reason I'm not having that issue. Probably has to do with using Gemini. If I forget I can ask it to remember (and it won't, but at least it can look at my code and try to explain it to me!) lol.