Author: Ramon Rodriguez
Posted: 7/25/2024

To round out the second month, I decided to work on one of the things the game loop was missing, being the shop menu. I made this choice because, at the time, we had the inventory implemented, and pickups were being made. Though, to be fair, it was also requested that it should be completed by the group. So, in order to finish the game loop, in a way, I had to do the work. It's implemented the best it can for what we currently have.

The shop had to have a lot of work to get it to be remotely functional. Admittedly, it took a while for it to even properly show up, and for a long time it would only show up if you had just spawned into the shop map. However, now it can be reopened by walking up to the shop. While getting the shop to spawn items on the map was easy enough, it was a lot harder to properly display what was being bought. To get the prices and names of items to show up correctly on the shop buttons, it took a lot of lists and making dictionaries behind the scenes to properly look everything up and get things sorted.

In total, it took four lists to store all the information I needed- one for the objects to be sold, one for their prices, one for how rarely they should show up (though this will be deprecated as we intend to make the shop static)  and one for the names to be used for them. Then, I had to make sure the text for the debt and the buttons were properly connected to the code, as well as making sure the owner was able to be called so it could be activated and deactivated when the trigger for it was hit or when the button to close it was clicked respectively. Additionally, I coded it so that debt could be "paid" via clicking the debt button. Since Money isn't fully implemented, though, it just decrements the remaining debt by 1, and all items are actually free.

To be fair, I'm quite proud of it, but it will need work in the future.