Hey, look, it's that winter month

And as a Deltarune fan, it is taking all of my concentration to not make the funny joke about the deer girl

Instead, I'll divert said concentration into some updates for y'all!

THE "WE'RE BACK"

Yep, with my heavier college projects for this semester having wrapped up, we're back to proactive Versotale development!

In between the last devlog and this one, we have done a couple minor things.

THE "WE'RE BACK" - Small Writing Tweaks, Massive Design Tweaks

We've done a little bit of fleshing out on some pre-existing scenes, and again, did some tweaking of characterization and location details for future areas past Haven

Also just recently, Daymations redesigned a major future character who y'all haven't seen yet, and it is an actual incredible redesign (Thank you, Day, I owe you a cookie for turning my ugly-ass design into something amazing)

Here's a funky little silhouette of said character. Day made the design, and I made the sprite. You won't be seeing them for a good long while, but I was far too happy with the new look to not at least show off the silhouette

THE "WE'RE BACK" - Robust-ifying the Code

Oh, yeah, also, I completely revamped the text system code. Yeah, that old piece of trash that took me an estimated 1-2 collective months to code and get working properly?

Yeah so I completely remade it from scratch within 2 days and the code is significantly easier to read, about 40% the size it originally was, and does the same thing, arguably better

UNFORTUNATELY, this is ANOTHER thing I can't really SHOW you because, well, it looks like it functions the exact same. It's the code itself that's 20x better

But what I CAN show you is this one random thing that will be funny only to the extreme programming enjoyers. Non-programming nerds, feel free to just skip to the ending section from here

THE CODING HIJINKS DETOUR - (CODING NERDS ONLY)

...Are the coding nerds still here?

Okay, take a wild guess as to why this control-checking function that Past Me made 7 or so months ago absolutely kills me to look at

If you're ALSO a programming nerd and/or someone pursuing a Computer Science major like me, this 7-line function body is painful to look at because it can literally be done in a singular line. Here's how:

...Yeah, there's a reason I wanted only coding nerds in here because only coding nerds would see a 7-line function body and think "Man, this is painfully inefficient, I can fix this up." I am one of said nerds

There is a LOT of old Versotale code that I want to fix up and basically "un-crap-ify." While the example I showed here was a small and funny one, there are aspects that deserve the same revamping treatment I gave to the text system, such as the overworld movement code. It's serviceable, yes, but it's incredibly messy and made at a time where I was just learning Gamemaker and trying to see if this project was even possible in game format

THE CONCLUSION

Sorry I didn't have a whole lot to show off here! It's practically tradition at this point that Versotale progress slows to a painful crawl around the end of semesters. If you're a Versotale veteran, you already know this, but if you aren't, I apologize!

Point is, we're back in action from the dreaded college finals hiatus! And I expect next time I make an update devlog, we'll have something pretty nifty to show off.