Devtober Day #12

Welcome back to Day #12 of Devtober, in which the inventory system is finally done and I can get on with my life.

After a day of spit, grit, and a whole lotta debugging, I can finally put the inventory system behind me and start getting to work on some actual game mechanics. Today's work has mostly entailed finishing up the inventory system, including storage, retrieval, and swapping functions, which should all be relatively self-explanatory. In the future, I'd still like to add some additional features, such as the ability to grab items from inventories based on how close the physical item is to your crosshair, but the current system is plenty serviceable for now (and I'd also really like to get started on the heat and pattern systems).

I also did a load of refactoring in my codebase to bring everything to standard in terms of naming conventions and file structure. As I was initially building out the project, scripts and files kinda just went to whatever folder felt right without regard for organization, so I've done a fair amount of housekeeping on that front to ensure that it doesn't become a problem in the future.

Moving on, now that we have a way to grab, carry, and store items, it's finally time to get to work on the heat system! The star player here, of course, is the forge, which will be the only way for the player to heat up the various metals they'll be working with. The forge will have its own heat level which will be controlled primarily via a bellows which will increase the heat. Since the forge's heat will dissipate over time, keeping an eye on the forge to make sure it doesn't drop too much will be an important part of being an efficient blacksmith.

The materials themselves will also have a variety of attributes pertaining to heat, such as "smelting temperature," the max heat before the metal melts, "forging temperature," the minimum heat needed to start forging, "heat resistance," how resistance the material is to changes in temperature, as well as the temperature ranges needed for heat treatment, including normalization, quenching, and tempering. As with the rest of the material attributes, these numbers will be randomized and hidden from the player, but can be unlocked through means such as the completion of special requests, excursions, leveling up, and buying the info from vendors. Other than these means, however, it's on the player to experiment with their materials to see what they're capable of.

The forge itself will also be something to experimented with, with a variety of different fuels that may have different effects on the heat level, or even impart special effects on materials heated with it. Alongside this, the forge and bellows themselves (as well as every other workstation) can be upgraded throughout the course of the game to allow for things such as the handling of hotter materials, faster heating and cooling, and the ability to stabilize the temperature at a certain heat, albeit at the cost of increased fuel consumption.

There's still plenty of work to be done before I've caught up to the demo, but now that I've started to move on to the more interesting stuff, at least it'll be a more enjoyable experience from here on out.

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

- Ian, Lunarium Works