u/8BitBeard

It's been a while since I last posted something about my progress! Already a while ago I've wrapped up my initial work on moving the crew members around the ship. But since their movement was done manually by clicking where they should go (which is only for debugging) I wanted to improve my old Shift Board imlementation to be ready to actually direct their movement (which is the intended way the crew will move around the ship).

Since this implementation was pretty much my first coding task I thought I should refactor the system - which I did, using Control Nodes this time around. After finishing it 95% I realized that I did not like the limitations that come with the built-in drag&drop for Control nodes ... so even though the improved data stucture (using custom resources) of this refactor was a big improvement, I decided to once again refactor the Shift Board (probably like the 4th time by then) and use Area2D for a custom-built drag&drop system. I'm really happy with the results.

In between this work I also created a really simple crew selection, a main menu and a game manager that moves between those game states - so I now have a some sort of real game flow going on.

And since going through the crew selection and setting up the shift plan for the crew every time I wanted to test (of course there were debugging setups but those became increasingly hard to handle) I decided it was time to work on a basic save & load system - which I just finished! It's probably good to have it in place now already since I'm pretty sure having this in early saves me a lot of pain compared to adding it much later and realizing I prepared my data and systems in an incompatible way for saving & loading.

Anyway, after all the Shift Board STILL does not command the crew around, but I feel I now have everything in place to finally approach this step. And once that is done, and a crew member will do their shift in the bridge I can implement ship controls! But that's for the future.