Chasing Elysium Devlog - February 2026

Month 2 of this dev cycle, which means working on actual new content! And as it turns out a few other features that I need in order to fully implement that content.

Features

Dialogue Auto-Advance

Dialogue boxes can now auto-advance! This is a flag set on individual dialogue boxes, though I may eventually add the option to enable this for all dialogue in the settings.

Walk 'n' Talks

The above enabled walk 'n' talks! And attached to walk 'n' talks, I also added the ability to forcibly slow the player down. While I don't want to use this too much (really only if it makes sense narratively), it is a way to give more time for walk 'n' talks to play out. The other aspect of giving them time to play out is to just... design the areas well so there's less chance of them getting interrupted.

I will want to look into allowing them to be interrupted at some point.

Flag Checks

To make it easier to only spawn things or enable triggers when certain conditions are met, I made a simple node that checks if conditions are met, and if not disables all of its children until the conditions are met. Right now I just have a Story Flag condition node.

I am planning a few other similar control nodes that can be activated by signals. It kind of feels like I'm building a node-based scripting language out of Godot's nodes... which can't possibly be intended behavior but it works and is dang powerful!

Kanban

Up until now I had been using a desktop wiki editor to maintain notes for the game, including my to-do list. The app I was using... seems to have bugs with undo. Which led to a large chunk of the to-do list being deleted with no means of recovery.

Unfortunately recovering from this and migrating my notes to more stable platforms took a good chunk of time, energy, and motivation, so I did not get as far in the chapter 1 content as I intended for this month. This does however mean that my to-do list is now stored in a kanban board, which is honestly an objective improvement so I can't complain too much.

Content

Chapter 1

Chapter 1 is planned to be three parts. I'm going to be vague to avoid spoilers~ This is all you're getting!

Current progress on each part is detailed below:

• Part 1:
  • Writing: 80%
  • Area Design: 10%
  • Combat Encounters: 20%
  • Cutscenes: 20%
• Part 2:
  • Writing: 0%
  • Quests: 0%
  • Area Design: 0%
  • Cutscenes: 0%
• Part 3:
  • Writing: 0%
  • Cutscenes: 0%