Cutscene Player: Fixes Upon Fixes

Hello You

I want to start today's post off with a simple "Hello!" I know some people read these occasionally and I'd like to say thanks for stopping by. I'd love to hear from you, if you got something to say. What brings you here?  What would you like to see in Xenodochium?

Where To Begin

Originally, I was going to feed my cutscene player into Gemini to ask for help in troubleshooting. But then I decided to first take a look under the hood myself. And it worked out okay. I started by looking in the UI manager, tracing the path of signals when the cutscene ends. That ended up being a wild goose chase though, since my signals aren't all doing anything. Some do, others are just waiting for future use.

Eventually, I found that the source of the issue was the cutscene wasn't hiding when it was done. Turns out it was a little bigger than that, because the game state isn't updating at the end of the cutscene like it should. Turns out, I left that part out! The reason my initial cutscene worked okay was because I was manually changing the state in my city scene because of some special circumstances. 

So, I updated my UI manager to force a return to the previous state after a cutscene is over (as long as it isn't the very first cutscene). But, that's not good enough when coming out of the induction terminal interface, because that just returns the player to that screen. So, I added another call to return to the previous state before I invoke the cutscene. This way, we pop back to the city state and immediately go into the cutscene. So when the cutscene ends, we return to the previous state of the city scene!

Saving The Day!

Then there's the matter of the automatic save. . . I think it wasn't working properly the way I originally added it. I have actually had it commented out during this testing. Upon adding the automatic save back I decided to add it as a deferred call, just to give the game a moment to make sure all the data is in order beforehand. And the player's name is saved properly!

Next Time

I'm not sure exactly what to work on next, there's still so much more to do. So I'm going to just approach it with the "Vertical Slice" idea in mind. I'll focus on the player's journey (as I do) and make improvements and additions to make the game more enjoyable. I have to work on dialogue, cutscenes, worldbuilding, and so much more!