Calamity!

So I managed to spill a glass of iced coffee on the laptop that held everything related to Chocolate Sauce, pretty much ruining it and all of my files forever. Fortunately I had a backup--I've lost two VERGE games with some amount of work on them already to horrible computer problems--and most of the rest of my files are at least sort of backed up as well. I'm hopefully getting an advance from my job to get a new computer, since I can't really work for them without it--we'll see how that goes, if that goes. Until then I can't really do any additional work, so hopefully I'll be up and running at some point pre-next week.

Fortunately I did a bunch of work earlier in the week, so here's how we stand with regards to last week's goals:

- Not really any new story in Tack. I think all the layout is done on the backup copy. There may be one or two doors to link up.
- The sprite for Cass is done; not sure if it'll be final.
- Map spells system totally works (except for one count of weirdness with the mouse pointer "sliding" inappropriately at certain points within the map spell effect range.) It's totally fun to play around with, too!
- Nothing new on the battle system--I did all the work to establish multi-enemy battles and it all still worked with one enemy, so I think it would have been pretty easy just to drop some extra enemies in and test it. (The big issue was just figuring out how to
call battles with the battle() function without going crazy.) Unfortunately I lost all of this work in the crash. Shouldn't be that hard to redo, but still agh
- Items system very far along: you can equip items by category, be given items by chests/characters, "use" items. No effects hard-coded yet but placeholders are and the actual effects code is all pretty easy. There's no range-checking unfortunately so you could keep getting items until it overflows your inventory array; that's about all that's left barring code to shift overflow items to your next party member or just to trash them altogether.
- No new monster art or code.

As far as next week's goals, god only knows--it all depends on when and if this advance comes through or if I have to like, get another job or something. (Not the ideal solution.) We'll see what happens. I lost my detailed "prep for release" schedule so I'm not even sure what I'm supposed to be doing to stay on target for September, but there's not that much more to do in Tack so probably just finishing all the game systems and then building the rest of the maps/dungeons/battles for this release, slowly but surely. It seems so simple when said that way.