Dev Diary: The Great Recode!
Hello everyone! Welcome to the first Dev Diary aimed at updating you all on the progress of The Great Recode, which I mentioned briefly a week or so back. A TL:DR on things if you missed it, I currently am going through the progress of fulling updating Vault of the Voids codebase to allow for many things, including easier expansions, but also the ability to publish to Mobile and Switch as well! Things have been pushing along here, I wanted to keep everyone in the loop with progress.
Firstly -- a huge thank you to all who reached out! From what I heard, everyone was okay with me sidelining the Daughter update so I can get the main codebase transfered over. Its not ideal, but I promise it will be for the best! It does save the issue of trying to maintain 2 code bases at once.
[h3]This will officially be the longest Vault of the Void has gone without a proper content update to the main game since well before Early Access.[/h3] To be truthful -- this is terrifying for me. I was always one that wanted to focus on getting fresh content to you all as often as possible -- so I really do apologise in advance! However, not only does this re-code allow for multi-platforming, it also does clean up a lot of the mistakes I made along the way, optimises a ton and also setups up for some great future content (new classes, finally!).
I'm not going to talk about the other platforms here, my focus with this post is to update re: the PC Steam version, which will be the first to get the new update.
[h3]So where are things at? [/h3]
Stuff has been happening around the clock! Firstly, I get to officially announce that Girlphobia, the brains behind the amazing Companion website has joined me on this quest to 2.0! Having someone to code alongside with for the first time since the dawn of the project has been amazing, and its really, really speeding things up as well! So far, they’ve done some amazing work with API’s to set up for cross platform progress syncing, and also cross system leaderboards. Also, this week we’ve just finished wrapping up the conversion scripts to bring players profiles from the old version of the game to the new 2.0 save system!
[h3]So what's been done? [/h3]
Right now, finished, or at least 90% done are:
This is actually a lot further than I originally thought I would be at this stage! It doesn’t sound like much, but a lot of this includes framework which will make the future screens much easier to fill out. On top of this, all these screens have been tested and, where needed, re-coded to fit on Mobile and smaller screens as well.
The biggest stages to come are the Battle Screen (card processing, monsters etc) and also the Deck Manager. I'm hoping to get a jump on these starting from next week!
Heres a few snippets from the new version so far!
Full UI Scaling option:
New Difficulty Screen:
New JSON save system, including proper support for 100% seeding:
Better space and layout inside the Compendium:
I hope this helps give people a bit of transparency around what's going on! I still don’t have a timeframe on completion, but I’ll continue to provide typed updates here every 2 weeks or so. The next big things to tackle will be the Deck Manager, and also some new animation frames for enemies, for screens with reduced sizes (Mobile/Switch). I'll be diving into these next week so I'll be able to provide a bit of a clearer update in the next Dev Diary!
As always -- thank you so much for your continued support! If you'd like more updates or to speak to me directly, please feel free to join the Discord. Please know I'm working as hard and fast as I can to get this out to you all -- I hope you're all looking forward to this 2.0 version!!
All for now,
- Josh
Firstly -- a huge thank you to all who reached out! From what I heard, everyone was okay with me sidelining the Daughter update so I can get the main codebase transfered over. Its not ideal, but I promise it will be for the best! It does save the issue of trying to maintain 2 code bases at once.
[h3]This will officially be the longest Vault of the Void has gone without a proper content update to the main game since well before Early Access.[/h3] To be truthful -- this is terrifying for me. I was always one that wanted to focus on getting fresh content to you all as often as possible -- so I really do apologise in advance! However, not only does this re-code allow for multi-platforming, it also does clean up a lot of the mistakes I made along the way, optimises a ton and also setups up for some great future content (new classes, finally!).
I'm not going to talk about the other platforms here, my focus with this post is to update re: the PC Steam version, which will be the first to get the new update.
[h3]So where are things at? [/h3]
Stuff has been happening around the clock! Firstly, I get to officially announce that Girlphobia, the brains behind the amazing Companion website has joined me on this quest to 2.0! Having someone to code alongside with for the first time since the dawn of the project has been amazing, and its really, really speeding things up as well! So far, they’ve done some amazing work with API’s to set up for cross platform progress syncing, and also cross system leaderboards. Also, this week we’ve just finished wrapping up the conversion scripts to bring players profiles from the old version of the game to the new 2.0 save system!
[h3]So what's been done? [/h3]
Right now, finished, or at least 90% done are:
- Main Menu
- Profile and Past Runs
- Statistics
- Options
- Compendium
- Challenge Coins
- Difficulty Selection
- Class Selection
- Booster Screen
- Map Screen
- Full run generation scripts with new JSON load/save system
This is actually a lot further than I originally thought I would be at this stage! It doesn’t sound like much, but a lot of this includes framework which will make the future screens much easier to fill out. On top of this, all these screens have been tested and, where needed, re-coded to fit on Mobile and smaller screens as well.
The biggest stages to come are the Battle Screen (card processing, monsters etc) and also the Deck Manager. I'm hoping to get a jump on these starting from next week!
Heres a few snippets from the new version so far!
Full UI Scaling option:
New Difficulty Screen:
New JSON save system, including proper support for 100% seeding:
Better space and layout inside the Compendium:
I hope this helps give people a bit of transparency around what's going on! I still don’t have a timeframe on completion, but I’ll continue to provide typed updates here every 2 weeks or so. The next big things to tackle will be the Deck Manager, and also some new animation frames for enemies, for screens with reduced sizes (Mobile/Switch). I'll be diving into these next week so I'll be able to provide a bit of a clearer update in the next Dev Diary!
As always -- thank you so much for your continued support! If you'd like more updates or to speak to me directly, please feel free to join the Discord. Please know I'm working as hard and fast as I can to get this out to you all -- I hope you're all looking forward to this 2.0 version!!
All for now,
- Josh