Hello, and welcome to a (slightly sleepy) devlog for Soluna’s Secret.

The growing pressure of my university course is looming overhead, but fortunately, I have had some time to add some new features, as well as tweak old ones. First off, I’m glad to be writing this in time for my scheduled Saturday deadline. It feels good to be back on track. I hope it lasts. The major revelation this week was figuring out what on Earth was wrong with TextMeshPro.

TextMeshPro is an extension package for Unity that adds in a bunch of utilities for showing text, both on the UI canvas and in the game world. The pixel-perfect text that I tweeted about a while back relies on this, so I’m happy to announce that after a great deal of effort…

And what a sweet return it is. The above example contains some text that isn’t really designed to be stapled down to the size of a peanut and blown up again, but it’s the thought that counts. The coming weeks will probably contain a lot of me experimenting with ways of getting textual information to the player. The first is this new-fangled inscription system:

This is going to mainly used for abstract things that may or may not contain actual writing. Things that you couldn’t understand at a glance. This works very differently to previous iterations of the game in that whilst reading them, you can’t move. One of the problems with the old system was that there was no indication of there being more text. No indication of where it all starts and ends. This should fix that. Granted, there are a few issues. In disabling movement and mouse look during reading, I also disabled gravity calculations.

Heh. That cracks me up.

The other experiment involving text would be this; you can now try to open locked doors, and the game will tell you they’re locked. I hope that eventually this will be paired with a sound effect and animation at some point. It also works for similar ‘errors’:

Neat, huh? Of course, it can be hard to make out the text sometimes. TMPro does have an outline feature, but:

…Yeah. Doesn’t looks so hot, does it? At least with the pixel filter on, anyway. I also decided that I wanted the light sources to cast shadows, since the projector aptly displays how far the light reaches.

And I know that I should hold the polish and keep working on these features, but:

I just couldn’t resist that. Not at all.

So, in the words of Sakura: “Well, I guess that's about it.”

Until next time…