Dev Log 11/11/25: Bug Catcher Joey

Happy November 2025!

  It's been  way  too long! I'm trying out a new method here of dev logging. 

I'm actually doing some dictation instead of typing everything out. Because if anyone has seen me on the forums or in discord, you'd know that my keyboard hates me. So this is going to be the first of two dev logs that I actually post ideally this month. 

I had a couple of personal matters to attend to this year, so while I have been doing dev work in the background, I have been unable to just do an actual devlog. This first one, is going to be focused on bugs and bugs catching that I did a lot of in August and September. I started playing a little bit more around with mouse and cursor navigation in the battle scene and discovered a couple of issues with how information was getting translated to the help window in battle and just different triggers that weren't working the way that they needed to in battle as well. 

Viridian Forest

A good chunk of the testing that I had been doing on navigating my battle UI, which is based on HUD Maker, was mainly either using the mouse or keyboard for navigation. In me trying to look at controllers and allowing my children to actually playtest the game a little bit with a controller, I came to realize that there were certain triggers that weren't happening appropriately when moving between specific items. Particularly, the issue was with dealing with row partners. Now, if you don't remember, row partners was my way of building in a sort art online style kind of pairing system for front row, back row for the party. And the idea was to be able to allow the row partners, people that are in the back row and the front row, to swap positions or in this more updated version, to allow the back row to actually take action without needing to be in the front position. Their skillset might get altered slightly depending on what skills they have actually equipped, but the overall concept was that they would just be able to take actions from the back row from now on.

The issue apparent was when highlighting the swap or the switch buttons that exist on the battle UI, it allows you to have a preview of whatever skills the role partner has equipped. So whatever's going to be available to them when you hover over it with your mouse or you use a keyboard cursor, the idea was that you can get a little bit of a preview of what they can actually use. What happened though, because of the nature of how my navigation plugin was set up initially, if you move the cursor away using  the  keyboard  or controller input from one of those switch buttons or swap buttons, it would still treat the actor you were highlighting, the one that you were getting the preview of, as the kind of like current acting party member. The problem with that is then when you switch to another skill, that next skill that it would default to if I had to go to another slot or like shift over somewhere, would show the old skill or show the skill for the previous character rather than the actual current character.

The correction in this scenario was to just add a delay in when the help window and when that kind of like mouse navigation actually updates and kind of reselects as a highlight. That little delay was just enough of a timing to reset the actor to be the correct character and then now the help windows in battle will always display not only the correct skill but the correct skill for the correct character that's actually involved. 

As many times as I have updates and kind of like reconfigured five times over how the battle system is going to work, I'm really glad that I took the step to move towards the tag system that I've always wanted, because I might not have ever noticed these underlying issues. Now, without having the tag system to begin with, they wouldn't have mattered, but it's still good to know just the overall practices. And as I'm getting better at a lot of this coding, it helps for me to do this kind of QA as a little bit more thoroughly as I can.

Viridian City

So now we're out of the woods and again doing this more thorough testing. One of the things I also noticed is while using the mouse navigation would update the CTB window so that the order actually gave you a little bit of a preview, I wasn't getting that same effect when we were either clicking or using keyboard and controller navigation to highlight those skill pages or highlight certain actions that a player could take during battle as well. So that has also been remedied. That was actually a quick fix so I'm kind of happy that I didn't have to worry about it too much. But it still felt very noteworthy because that was actually a big aspect of one of the previous devlogs was, oh yeah now there's a little bit of preview when you hover over you can see and you can get all this extra information, but that extra information was only from mouse users and touch users at the time. So again really really glad that I got that locked in and cleaned up.

The last one for this devlog is something a little bit more visual. It wasn't necessarily a bug, but the idea was how do I make sure that what a player is seeing in the main menu, how they're interpreting things in battle, also matches the overworld sprites. So I rigged up a quick script that makes sure that the row order, so the way that the party is set up in battle is also the same order that you're gonna kinda see them walking around on the overview. So if, for example, you have Penny and Addy are index zero and one, the first two characters are gonna be top row, they're gonna be the first and second characters that you see, and then you have Lucien and Harper that would be after that in the remainder. It's a little fix. It's not something monumentous. It's not something that actually affects gameplay, but just from kind of a lore perspective, you would expect the row pairs, the row partners to be next to each other as they're kind of navigating the world and walking around. It was important enough for me, so I figure somebody else might also be excited about that news, so just felt the need to mention it.

This is my  reminder that I  have to update  Harpers  overworld sprite hair  haha.

A little more text heavy than usual, but again, for the sake of having a dev log, and these are things that I had on my Trello board, and I just wanted to make sure that I'm tracking and make sure that I'm capturing in an important way, because I know a lot of people are excited about the storyline, a lot of people are excited about the visuals. There's always at least one person out there that wants to read what somebody's process was like and what the thought process was behind some of the changes they had to make on the back end of things. So if you're interested in those sort of things, this dev log was for you. 

Thank you all. As always, expect a second dev log sometime this week, hopefully, and I say that knowing that I suck at keeping deadlines with these things. 

But until then, see you online.

-  Puppet