Devtober Day #2

I have a feeling posting past midnight is going to become a common theme here...

Welcome back to Day 2 of Devtober, in which I continue to chip away at making progress! Very slowly... Chip away...

Also in which I find out that itch.io doesn't accept gifs in devlogs and I learn how to use OBS for screen capture :P

Today I worked on yet more groundwork to make sure that future features are properly supported so I can focus on them without having to worry about other stuff. For now, what that's entailed has been a first-person controller, as well as the ability to interact with the various workstations the player will be using throughout their blacksmithing endeavors.

The interaction system is designed to be a context-based one, meaning that what the interaction actually does will determine on a few things, primarily being what's in the player's hands when they interact with a workstation. For example, if the player interacts with the forge with a crucible in hand, they'll simply place it in the forge without having to switch perspectives. If they interact with the forge with a piece of worked metal, however, they'll get the fixed perspective camera and be able to move the worked metal as needed to heat it up. The same goes for the various smithing modes and the anvil. 

I'm using a fixed camera for some aspects of workstation use since I feel having a more "game-like" view will make things like the smithing process a lot easier. Since the cursor will be unlocked while in workstation view, the player will have much more control over which voxels are selected than if they were to try and use the first-person camera to do it. In the future, I'd like to make the transition between the first-person view and the workstation view to be a lot smoother, where the camera shifts cleanly from one perspective to the other instead of just switching cameras, but that's a problem for later.

Tomorrow's plans entail actually starting to redevelop the smithing feature with the aid of old code from the demo version of the game, so hopefully, that'll make my life a lot easier than the first go around. A man can dream, I suppose.

Anyway, that's about it for now. 'Till tomorrow,

- Ian, Lunarium Works