Mr. Marcos Man here, bringing you the latest in Party Panic! updates. This devlog we'll be talking about the board systems the players can interact with, because that was the main focus of my month and it took a lot of effort. 

I've spoken on here previously about the shop system, and how it was broken, and the traveler was hungry and etc etc. Well, the traveler never came back, maybe they died, but we got the shop system working since then! Woohoo! Players can now buy items from the shop and use them in future turns. Today, I had the great idea to rename these items into "spells", because I realized we had wizard characters that were not doing many wizarding. 

As for items, we don't have that many right now, but we have the skeleton to make more. Right now, we have 3 roll modifiers: +3, +7, and +10 to the next roll, and we also have a "teleport yourself to a random player" item. In the future, I plan to add:
- Teleport to a random tile
- Steal gems from another player
- Roll two dice
- Select your roll amount

These items sound fun, but on their own they don't really serve that much of a purpose. As it stands right now, the only win-con we have for the game is "Who has the most gems after X amount of turns?". That's where keys come in! Keys will be available on a random tile on the board at the start of the game, designated by a golden, attractive, delicious glow, which players can walk over to purchase a key with gems. From here, the first person to gather enough keys to open the door and race into the last straight wins.

Once all these features are implemented, the board will feel more cohesive and with meaning. another developer on the game, Whitaker Antalek, mentioned he would want the board to be playable and fun without minigames. That way, we have a good base, and the minigames add to that fun.

--- 

Now Lets talk about a problem I had this week. The logic for the key tiles. What a headache! So we have a system to keep track of data (player location, items, keys, gems, etc). But from the way we have our systems set up, I can't store the same tile currently set to a key tile to re-use after the board is reloaded. This is because the objects are reset every time the level is loaded, so I couldn't keep a reference to the object between loading screens. I went through many iterations to solve this issue, but I finalized on this: I made an array with all possible key tiles. Then, before a minigame is loaded, I would save the NAME of the current key tile. This string variable would stay between levels. Then, after the minigame was played and the board was reloaded, I go through the array and check what name matches the string variable I have saved. It might not be the most efficient solution... but it works. It works and that's all I need.

Thanks for tuning in, we hope to have this new system in place by Friday next week,

Marcos out.