*Snap* 853 Cards. 500 monsters have fusions.

This is yet another preview into the programming techniques I'm using in the Yu-Gi-Oh! Duelists of the Roses remake. 

Within the last 2 days, I made *more* major milestones. I wrote two small applications to assist with development: DORCardArtScraper and DORFusionParser. Both of these are relatively small programs with no doubt loads of programming sins, but they work and they work fairly well. 

My base data for the game came from two primary sources.

1. Yu-Gi-Oh Fandom Wikipedia, for general card list and base information for all cards.

 From the Yu-Gi-Oh Fandom website, I was able to (relatively easily too, might I add) export a spreadsheet based on the entries on the Duelists of the Roses card list page. This gave me just about every point of data I needed except for fusions and card art.

2. IGN Guide for Duelists of the Roses fusions

I chose to go with hard coded fusions for a few reasons The most appealing being the fact that I can take this guide, parse it out,  fix any spelling errors, and generate readable data that I can import through Unity. Once this data is read into Unity, I parse the names and convert it to Card Entries in the Master Card List. 

x. I used the spreadsheet of Duelists of the Roses cards that I generated in step 1 to iterate through all card names. I trim special characters out of the card names and scrape the Card Gallery page for each card. I sort out any links that are images and trim off any URL parameters for resizing that the wikia does. For the URLs that remain, (usually about 100 or so) I check to see what ones have close to equal width & height and save them to a folder with the format {cardNumber}_{cardNameNoSpace}. Any URLs that made it through that aren't even remotely close to the right size for card art are blacklisted. It would be relatively easily to blacklist other images that don't match, but I'm not so sure how many times I'll be repeating the process since the images are now downloaded. 

By saving these images in this specific format, it makes it really easy to go back into Unity and write a small function to automatically assign these card images.

Inevitiably, there are some duplicates. But I'll take an hour of deleting duplicates and a few other misc square images over doing what I had this do manually. 

There were also about 40-60 cards that I had to go out and manually find card images for. These were mostly cards that were renamed that Duelists of the Roses (or I, for that matter) didn't even take into account. There were also cards that had numbers in the name that didn't get parsed right.  

Since I have a fairly complete set of data, I would like to write another small class to handle exporting all this data to a nice HTML based manual/wiki for bundling with the game or hosting later. It would be relatively easy to write this and include a full card list, separate pages for each card, and have each card show what cards it can fuse with and detail what effects it has. Since I'm probing Unity data, I can even get a rendering of the card in the engine to showcase on the page. All based on data already present/in the game!

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Recently, I upgraded the project to Unity 2020 and had to upgrade a few assets I depend on, such as Rewired and Mirror. Rewired upgraded relatively easily, but Mirror required a lot of refactoring. The game is currently running and mostly functional, but some things had to be changed to accompany the updates and get the game running today. That will require more time for testing of course. 

Deck Editor needs an update now, it's very slow at handling all the cards rendered but I'm rendering it very slow and ineffectively with a separate GameObject for each entry in either list. 

The newly added UI hints module will have to be tweaked some more too. Its sizing is horrible. 

So here I leave you all with some screenshots with the game in its current state. I'm hoping to get some misc bugs and tweaks worked out soon and have a playable beta as soon as possible.