Game Journal #75.5 - Small UI Changes, Vacation

Hey all! Got another game journal here, albeit of a mini one. As you may remember, I'm going on vacation for two weeks starting on Saturday. I'll be going to Hot Springs, Arkansas, to see what the area's like and if I want to live there. I'll be driving my car down there, so I made sure to get all the maintenance done beforehand. The total trip is about 15 hours long. Isn't that kinda cool? Haha.

Related to that, I had to ask for time off of work, and it was a bit of a hassle due to the length. First I tried to request it around January, when I decided to go. I was denied because HR told me that I should wait until the dates are closer so I could have more PTO accumulated. Ok, fair. So I wait, my PTO accumulates, and then suddenly it all gets cashed out as one big check two weeks prior to the date. I was pretty shocked when it happened, I actually thought that I was overpaid by mistake, but apparently once you accumulate enough unused PTO it gets cashed out automatically. Not bad, but at the same time I now had approximately 0 PTO hours to use for the vacation. Which, lol. I originally requested it as unpaid time off anyway, so it made no difference to me.

So I request the time off again, this time one week prior to the date. Denied again, this time with no reason given. At this point I was starting to feel pretty miffed. I was beginning to have flashbacks of when I was unemployed temporarily after college and I couldn't find a job despite "nObOdY wAnTs To WoRk AnYmOrE!" Grim times, that. At that time, I would spend half the day on Indeed, and the other half on r/antiwork. I hadn't felt the need to visit antiwork since starting at FedEx (cause it's awesome there,) but boy if my situation didn't remind me of all the vacation-request horror stories on there! Even though I was going to Arkansas with or without approval, I certainly wanted to keep my job. So getting approved was in my best interest.

I was all prepared for a situation like this.

So, what ended up happening? Well, all I had to do was go in-person to the HR department and request a leave of absence. That was it. FedEx has this weird thing where you have to handle all your scheduling business on a mobile app, so that was where I originally tried to request my vacation time. But I guess for longer time periods you need to do it in-person. Oh well, lesson learned. Anyway, I got my time off, so I can go down to Arkansas worry-free. I'm pretty excited to go down there. I even have some homes I want to look at, and a real-estate agent. Who knows? By the time I post again, I might have a pending deal. We'll see, of course. More likely than not I'll be coming back to Jersey with nothing to show for it, but hey. Can't say I didn't try!

Okay, now what about the game? Well, I did a few things. Firstly, I updated my project to Unreal Engine version 5.2 (up from 5.0.) That was a complete headache for a few days. There's this bug(?) where a level made in an older version will instantly crash the editor upon being loaded. The only way to fix it is to enable level streaming on the level. Well, guess who had an older version level as the default map when the project is opened? Yeah. It took me AGES to figure out why I couldn't even open my project. It was incredibly frustrating... but that's all said and done now.

The game's lighting system looks a bit better in the new version, which is nice, and I also updated the input system to use Enhanced Input. I'm really close to having a functional button-mapping Settings menu, but it'll have to wait until I get back from vacation.

UI-wise, I updated the dialogue History widget to have icons and emoticons based on who's talking. Take a gander:

Pretty cool, huh? Of course, the red backgrounds are just temporary. But I feel like the icons give a lot more life to the history screen. Not sure if I'm going to give them a border or not, but for now I like the look. What do you think?

Here's a small video showing what I changed since last time. I really like the direction the UI is going. Finally, my game is starting to look somewhat professional in my eyes. Presentation is pretty important, especially for a first impression.