What's been going on

What's going on:

For all of October except 2 weekends, I've been in Minneapolis for work. (I was flown back home for Canadian thanksgiving, and then again at the end of the month to take care of personal bills/etc/halloween). So I bought a laptop, and brought it/my development PSP with me, and work on the game pretty much the whole time I'm not working out here. Which is a lot of the time. This is great, because there's no distractions, like at home, to pull me away from this.

I don't have my equipment to give more videos/screenshots with me, but I can at least tell you what I've been working on:

I've got the GUI system virtually complete. In itself, it works 100%, but with any interaction to anything else (changing equipment, etc...), it's not working yet, because I don't have anything implemented for inventories/etc yet on the PSP version. All the GUIs in the game are loaded via XML files, so it'll be easy to create/change layouts until I'm happy.

Also, I've created a new way to input text, for character naming. If a person practiced, s/he'd likely get upwards of 30ish (as a guess?) WPM typing speed, on a PSP^^ But since the only time you type in this game is during character creation, it's not like it's a major feature. Note also, that I can't take full credit for the text input system. The -idea- was somebody else's. I used it once in some other homebrew, loved it, and created a heavily modified version for my game. Like, stupidly modified. Heh.

With that part completed, I want players to be able to name their characters in Japanese, so I'm using this time to implement Japanese support to the game. It's proving to be a slightly more difficult task than I thought, but I think I can get it working well enough, but likely with extremely limited kanji support. At the very least, hiragana, katakana, and english will be supported. I'm not about to create my own Japanese IME for this game. Heh.

Other things I've done aren't nearly as visible: Input management. I can send button presses/analog movements to wherever I want, so the appropriate part of the game can handle it (layman terms: When you press the up button, now the game knows whether it should move the GUI cursor up, or move your character up on the screen, etc..) Slowly creating a custom GUI skin system, to allow the player to select different skins for the GUI (just like the real game!), Improved the intro sequence slightly, to make it more authentic. (there's a couple seconds of a simple FFVI logo at the beginning before the clouds start rolling, etc..) Small graphical improvements. I've been spending a lot of time coding, so much of the stuff I have complete don't look very pretty as I've put some "coder's art" temporarily in place just to make it work, and haven't replaced it yet.