This week has seen a record low in time available to work on the game. Kids, work and of course table top RPGs zapped up a lot of the spare time. However, I did find time to do a few bits and pieces.

Bug Fixing

The first bit of house keeping this week was to squash a few bugs - and by a few I mean loads. Some examples include:

• NPC conversation dialogs don't show up on Safari desktop. 
• The moustache overlay has a mixing pixel - yes really, one pixel.
• You can walk on water - sometimes.
• Status message are lost when you die

There were many many more ranging from the ridiculous to the impossibly difficult to reproduce. Thanks to the people who have been trying the game out for finding them all!

Refactoring

One of things that gets lost when you're just trying to make stuff work is the real software engineering that keeps code malleable, repeatable and predictable. It's quite often a matter of chucking as much in as quickly as you can to stay motivated. 

This week I took a step back and refactored the code - for those who don't know, refactoring is the process of spending ages moving code around, simplifying and generally tidying up with the absolute objective of nothing changing in the game. Yes, really. 

I had classes that were 1000+ lines of code and algorithms that were repeated across my code base. It's a bit better now - no more huge classes and concerns separated nicely. I could probably continue refactoring for another month but thats really not my style.

Flashback to Pre-loaders

Back in the day... I'm not really sure what that phrase means but I've always wanted to be cool enough to use it. In the 2000s I had the misfortunate of making Flash games. One of things every flash games developer had was a "pre-loader" - a starting scene in which the rest of the images, sounds, levels etc were loader while showing enough of a screen to tell the player that the game was here!

Part of this week's housekeeping was to add in the same concept, the page for Tales will now load quickly and then proceed to load everything else. On mobile particularly this really works. 

If you're using iOS, don't forget to try out the "Add To Home screen" option in Safari to install Tales of Yore as something that looks like a normal app! This will be made more prominent in the game at some later point.

Custom Cursor

The final piece I wanted, that I'd never done before, was a custom mouse pointer in HTML/CSS. It turned out to be extremely easy and effective. One gotcha was the pointer has to be 32px or smaller otherwise it disappears at the edge of the screen - hence you can say hello to "Stubby" - my mouse pointer.

And thats it for this week. I'm working on combat and levelling rules at the moment. Hopefully I'll be able to talk about that next week. 

Thanks for reading, testing, or whatever you're doing here.