Idle Research 2 - Developer Standup Blog News - Episode 3 (XV-L)

This is probably the longest steam announcement ever, sorry if it lags

Episode 3 - Posts XV-L

5/20/25-12/14/25

Dev Standup 25.0: UI Refactoring from Polling to Reactive (Epic UI Optimization)

5/20/25 - III.XV

I spent the last few weeks celebrating my recent graduation and working on some IR2 refactoring... again! Visually, I only have this screenshot to show you of some Library UI tweaks. I am in a position where customizing UI is getting easier by the day, and I have complete control over when things like text need to be updated.

For instance, if I gain some KWL, it should change the value and the text. I use a pretty complicated system that involves chaining the game data and the text.

Technicals if you're interested:

There is a notification producer and a notification consumer that handles this behavior.

The producer: emits a notification if the value it holds changes.

The consumer: receives a notification from a producer or another consumer. Also emits a notification if a change was made and it passes it onto other consumers.

KWL would be a producer, and the text would be a consumer because it relies on KWL to change via gameplay. KWL gets updated every game tick. At the start, this text updates once every 10 seconds. No need for text to check every frame. It is possible for other consumers to check if the text changed, for whatever reason....

What this means moving forward:

With more control over the UI, the better the UX and more interesting the UI can look. I want to find clever ways of displaying important data without invasive elements.

Major reduction in battery consumption, a big problem with IR1!

On the near agenda:

1. Self-assigning as tasks

2. IQ prestige testing + IQ currency

3. IQ milestones + rewards

4. IQ lifting + WIZ currency

Dev Standup 26.0: Securing the Bolt+Reactive Frameworks

5/22/2025 - III.XVI

This is part 2 of the previous standup (25.0)... very short backstory for this:

some of my buttons aren't updating it and I thought it was my reactive UI system. So far it doesn't seem like the case...

I have created a new "mock" scene that will be used strictly for testing UI and new features. TLDR; easy sanity check for me If I make a change and it breaks the mock, then it will definitely break in the game. On the other hand, if it breaks in game but not the mock, then the frameworks are good, but not the game.. It's not supper clear what's going on other than a neato graph, but here is the gist:

For the setup shown in the main graph (not the @even button), it's tracking a single toggle value. All the buttons change based on this single value. It's the @toggle button's responsibility to let the other buttons know when to change as well.

So a test is ran at the beginning, testing the basic user actions (such as toggling a button), and makes sure that all the properties for a button have changed successfully. Afterwards, I can have some fun by manually clicking that @toggle button in the