Mostly QOL update

Greetings and salutations everyone! I am indeed still working on this game of mine! Behold, new update!

New stuff

Variables!

This update brings in a brand new feature, variables! Players currently have no way of creating new variables cause they're super powerful, but you start with a few. When you play a card that has a variable, you can click on the variable in the script to change what it is. The biggest use is for the movement cards, and that brings me right into the next point:

A better hand layout

The hand clutter has long been a known issue. Variables fix that! Instead of having the movement cards be in the hand, they now exist off to the side. Variables let me condense the amount of space that the side hand took up, effectively letting me make each card bigger. It also reduces the total max hand size. The other additional affect is that the starting deck no longer has 1 movement card in each direction, but rather 3 movement cards for any direction. Placing two movement cards for the same direction is vital for certain maneuvers, so I'm glad that it's now much easier to set up. 

Other

Along with a better hand, I've improved upon the cards. The cards are now wider and less tall. I've also changed the font in both the cards and the code display to be monospace (pretty much just for the looks. It also helps with readability though). Only the cards in the hand have been adjusted. The other card displays will take a bit more work, but should be done for the next update. 

Thanks to the monospace font on the cards, I was also able to make the text on cards be indented and look good, so I'm happy with that.

The tooltip also got a tweak - I almost doubled its width. That should make it a lot better with some of the cards that have a lot of stuff on them. 

Bug fixes

• The "return to game" button in the info panel is no longer hidden behind the text 

Not many bug fixes this time, I was more focused on getting this QOL patch out. I wanted a warm up to get back into dev work, and this QOL stuff was great for that. 

Next up

I'm honestly not sure what big task I'll be taking on next. A lot of my system ideas are rapidly becoming very interconnected at this point, so working on one thing also helps other things. 

I will need to go through and update the cards to all be the new style, and the tutorial is ever in need of attention. At some point the tutorial is planned to be fully integrated as a thing that just happens during the first run, but I'm not quite there yet.  

Most likely I'll need to put work towards a better board generation system though. I want to add in stuff like obstacles (both walls and pits), as well as enemies that shoot projectiles (no promises on this one), and all that requires a much more in depth board generation algorithm. That update would cause ripples across pretty much all the other fight systems, I'd love to get that done before I continue with my other plans. Anyway, we'll see in the next update what I end up working on!

Where I've been

It's been about a month since my last update, so I wanted to give a quick explanation. Well, what happened was I went to GDC this year (mid march), and got a whole bunch of thoughts and suggestions on a lot of things. Post GDC I also spent some time doing other life things, like making myself a portfolio website, and that took up a bunch of time. I am getting back into the swing of working on Coding Cards though, so updates should become regular again. 

Thank you to everyone who's played the game despite the lack of updates, and especially to those who gave me feedback! It truly does mean a lot to me!