The good stuff: 

Good evening all!  It's that season again, and yet I come to you with only minimal additions to the build this week!  Forgive me!  I added some music, the health tracker, and some new cards.  Every turn you end without playing a card costs one health.  This forces the player to make decisions but as its not an instant game over (with six health) there is a buffer if none of the cards you've been dealt are helpful.  I both wanted to add pressure to the game, and help mitigate unfairness.  I realize this update has very little to show off, and I'll remedy that with the next one, but I've been dealing with some life stuff which has slowed my progress more than I'm happy with.  

Content added:

• Health!
• Music!
• New cards!

Problems this week? 

I had a few interesting issues this week, but as it's break time for me (and likely for you) I'll highlight just two.  Firstly, I was notified of an issue wherein restarting the game after a game over revealed an empty board with no cards.  The fix here was interesting, and snowballed into an issue I had meant to fix for a while but had simply forgotten about.  

The other issue was pretty silly in hindsight - I simply could not get the volume sliders to bend to my will.  No matter what I would do those suckers would not work.  Either they would not adjust the sound at all, or the volume made no sense.  Just wait until you hear how this one was resolved - it does not paint me in a competent manner haha.

Okay, and what did I do?

The first issue was spicier than I initially presumed.  I thought to myself, "Oh! I just need to dig into the reset game function," and boom, problem solved.  Except it didn't quite work out so cleanly.  While the function was mostly the issue, (I just wasn't utilizing it for the game over screen) it didn't actually resolve the empty hand.  A few hours poking at random lines of code later and I finally had my answer.  It turns out I had two separate issues.    For one, I needed to reset all the cards (easy) and for two I needed to reset the hand SLOTS (also easy), but every time I would solve one and it didn't work I would assume it was the other and roll back.  I was really tired, I swear.  Either way problem fixed.

As for the volume issue, it turns out at some point in the distant past I had wired the music volume to work in a rush just to prove to myself that it worked.  This fix was far more insidious than I thought.  Though I had two sound busses for two tracks (to allow for crossfading) I was only actually using one of them.  This took me way longer to figure out than I'd like to admit.  Beyond that, the real problem was my routing.  It turns out none of my sound was routing to the master bus after all!  In the end, its a bug I was glad I encountered, as it showed me a greater problem at its core.  

Honestly, have a safe and happy holiday season.  I'll be back next week, same time same place - but I'll totally understand if you don't read until after the holidays! 

Eli