Monthly progress update #9 — Working on text stuff

Since I haven’t had much luck with reworking the isometric overworld library into something better and less complicated to use, I spent last week picking up things I should’ve done ages ago but remembered about them only now, namely, text output refactoring and producing additional files for my custom font, Kvalligraphy (will be available to download this week). Typing out most of the additional ASCII symbols for Butano header files and cutting the font’s spritesheet accordingly turned out to be a massive chore that, judging by the font’s current download count, will definitely be for naught, which is why I’ve decided to leave all those behind for the 8x8 variant and release its Butano font file pack without the extended stuff for now (the 8x16 version will retain all of the additional Latin letters included with the font along with some other printable extended ASCII characters). Thankfully, using usenti helped make the process a bit easier, if you don’t count the fact that I had to switch laptops every so often to work on this.

As for the text output, it was surprisingly not very complicated to not only fix the break-a-string-into-several-small-ones method I wrote for the initial demo, but also to make the typewriter effect for outputting these strings on screen. Unfortunately, some things still need to be addressed before I can finally update the repository (that I’m thinking of migrating to somewhere else), such as: 

• figuring out how to store strings for these methods to use
• figuring out how to properly handle the string output (either make a separate textbox class (current pending solution) or cram everything into text output class)
• designing a simple markup syntax and a parser for it for including various visual effects to accompany the text while it gets typed on screen

That is all for this month’s update. Hope this little glimpse into my coding/character typing process was of interest to someone. Even though working on all this (and occasionally playing Sakura Taisen GB on my GBA) has put my right wrist under a moderate amount of strain, I’ve decided to try making something for the currently ongoing GBA Jam after all before it ends in less than two weeks. Because why not c: