Day 84 of streaming no signal:

• https://vods.exodrifter.space/2024/05/28/1855
• Added or improved descriptions to all of the items in levels, with the exception of items that I want to have dynamic descriptions for.
• Fixed bug where tape keeps playing when you leave the room containing the tape without bringing it with you — this required refactoring the playback code, but the solution is still not very good.
• Added avatars to the chat log, which was difficult to do because I can’t just use any image due to licensing/copyright issues and avoiding sources that do not have a good provenance. Ended up making a few different avatars with Blender and Krita.

Overall, the development process felt really tedious and difficult today. Ideas for improving the workflow:

• One thing that really slowed down adding descriptions to items in the levels was having to add the necessary boilerplate for the new keys in the localization code. This problem happens because Godot doesn’t know how to do localization if static strings aren’t used in a tr call in a script, so I cannot simply add a string in the inspector and have the built-in localization pick it up. I should find a better way to do localization.
• I need to spend some time implementing an improved audio system for Godot that I would like to use for narrative games. The existing audio system makes it difficult to change the audio from one type of playback to another. It also does not make it easy to play new audio and modify playing currently audio from a script.
• Using Blender to create 2d images was surprisingly nice and I would prefer doing it again over looking for appropriate images online. However, I haven’t used Blender very much for a long time so much of my basic knowledge is obsolete. I could spend some time brushing up on Blender basics so I can put scenes together more easily.