Turning Lemons into a Lemonade - Developing the Spell Crafting Mechanic

In this devlog I will not go for a deep philosophical discussion, I promise. This post actually is intended just to keep record of this part of the game development, because I think the situation (and the result) were very cool.

To the list of things that I don't have any mastery in game development, you can also add UIs. It does not help that the UI I was trying to do was a complex crafting menu with about 10 different modifiers for the new reworked spell system (which is still the best thing to happen to this project). It was simply not coming together.

Then I had an idea: We are making the game much more "physical" now, playing with projectiles, collisions and not being afraid of things getting funky. Wouldn't it be nice if the spell crafting followed the same concept? 

So I came up with a physical object-based crafting system. The crafting involves 3 major steps:

1. Selecting a scroll from a shelf and setting it in the catalizer
2. Placing the spell ingredients (modifiers) into a cauldron
3. Interacting with the catalizer again to craft the spell and store it

There is a lot of quality-of-life stuff I am already thinking for this system to not become a chore and end up disincentivizing players to craft. But I found this to be a pretty cool system that fits the type of game TSV is now becoming with the rework.

Here is a short demo of the new system:

Yeah, there is still a UI for the spell selection, which I don't see a fitting alternative for now - guess I will still need to learn how to make some decent UI afterall.