Devlog Update: Full Weekend of Development Thanks to Shorty! 🎮✨

Hey everyone,

We’re diving into a full weekend of development thanks to @Shorty’s monthly contribution! Your support directly fuels our ability to push forward, and as a result, today marks the beginning of a focused sprint to refine our dialogue system and make real progress on the core of the game.

What We’ve Done So Far

Over the past few weeks, we’ve been incrementally building the foundation of the dialogue system during our free time. That effort has led us to:

✅ Implemented the dialogue structure – Fully working system with dice rolls, stat-based overrides, branching responses, and animation-ready dialogue output.
✅ Game-ready input system – Moved to Unreal's new Input System with response selection mapped to keys.
✅ Built the manager structure – A fully functional DialogueManager now handles transitions, responses, and text animation.
✅ Hooked up a custom PlayerController – Designed specifically for UI-driven interactions.
✅ Squashed countless bugs – From timing desyncs to missing context references, we’ve cleaned up a lot of the internal logic.

The Real Upgrade Starts Now

All of this effort was laying the groundwork in whatever free time we could spare. But starting today, we’re shifting into high gear for this weekend:

🚀 Finalizing Input Handling – Fixing the last remaining issue where mouse clicks aren’t being properly detected, possibly due to Unreal’s handling of raw input. We're now experimenting with a UI-based invisible click panel to solve this.
🎨 UI Pass Begins – Now that the logic is stable, we’re integrating actual UI elements to get the first visual feel of the in-game dialogue system.
🎲 Deeper Stat Integration – Refining how dice rolls and stat-based choices impact branching paths.
🛠️ Debug Tools Expansion – Adding a better in-game way to trigger and test dialogues dynamically.

We’re fully locked in this weekend, so expect more detailed updates as we make progress. Massive thanks again to @Shorty for making this weekend sprint possible!

💜 Your support directly fuels this game, and we’re pushing hard to make it something special. Stay tuned for more updates soon!

— Lily & Sempai