Over the past two weeks, I have done roughly four weeks’ worth of work. If that sounds unhealthy, it sure felt like it, too!

In all honesty, I fell into a bit of a UI hole over the Thanksgiving break where I wanted to get the ClawCaptain pause menu done and then that just kept taking longer and longer and kept getting deeper and deeper until suddenly I had worked an unknown amount of hours in about three or four days. I got it done, though!

The ClawCaptain is the new pause menu that has four screens: a party manager for viewing your skills, a calendar for viewing your tasks and events, an inventory screen for seeing items you have, and a system screen for saving and quitting. It took forever, but I got it done, and it works pretty well. I had planned on adding a map screen, as well, but it was obvious that that was going to be WAY too complicated, so I didn’t bother.

The screen was honestly mostly a lot of copying and pasting code, which was both nice and not nice. I wanted it to be as modular as possible, with superclasses and reusable objects. However, each screen was juuuuuuuust unique enough not to be fully modular and it required a good amount of tedious code copying.

In the MIDDLE of my UI pit, though, I ran into a completely separate issue/revelation. Over the past couple of months, I’ve been getting more and more frustrated with how dark my dithering shader is, but I couldn’t figure out what was happening and how to make it better. I tried modifying all the different constants and variables but nothing worked. In the middle of my UI trench, I also watched and read a lot about shaders and learned about color space for fun. After reading many articles about dithering, I ran into someone talking about the difference between dithering in sRGB and Linear color spaces and IT CLICKED. I realized that my shader was using sRGB logic but Unity uses Linear color space, so I updated my shader with better logic (it’s much simpler now, also), and look at this!

It looks so good!

It’s much, much brighter, now, so I had to completely re-light all my scenes, update all my materials, and re-color my UI but this was all welcome work because I wanted to do it anyways. I got most of this done after I finished the UI but did fix the shader itself in the middle of the UI work. I am, suffice it to say, very happy with all of this. I feel much better about the game now.

I did a wild amount of other work when I finished that stuff just because I was having fun and wanted to keep going, but I won’t bother detailing all of them here. Some highlights, though, are that I got better wall decorations, added random rainy days, and added more strategy tips to the skills menu.

From here, I’m in the final stretch. The last large batch of fixes I need to do is a handful of combat updates that should make the action a bit clearer. Then it’s just playing through it and making little polish changes and bug fixes.