Player House and New Interactions - Devlog

Hi there!

Things are coming together nicely in the last weeks. While working with physics and interactions with solid objects sometimes can be very challenging, it is very fun and excting to see everything making sense. It is satisfying to finally be able to take assertive creative decisions because you know how you want the game and experience to be.

With the whole physical spell crafting system, I noticed that any UI menu felt a little clunky and immersion breaking. So I decided that I was going to avoid full-screen menus at all costs. In the situations where there is no escape, I want to make things as organic as possible, without taking the control out of the player. You can see what exactly I'm talking about down below...

2 big things I would like to document in this devlog:

1. Player House Extreme Make Over

Up until this point, the player house was probably the most finished piece of map/level I had created. It contained stuff that I was planning to implement, and to be honest I really liked the vibe of it. However, with the huge amount of individual objects we needed to store for the spell crafting system (which I went over in my last devlog), we had to make some room. 

You can see below how it turned out (please ignore the weird lines on the walls, this is some lighting build shenanigans):

2. New interactions

Now that the player has a new way to interact with the world, I have been working on how exactly this will work in situations where a UI menu was an obvious choice. In the last weeks I came up with 3 major interactions:
- To create a spell, you need a blank scroll first. The player now can go to a bookshelf and select which type of scroll they want to use
- After adding the ingredients to the cauldron, the player needs to interact with the catalyzer where the scroll is to give the spell a name and craft it. Once crafted, the player can select the spell at the spell book (I still need to figure out an option for this interaction...)
- I created a merchant! This kind guy will be roaming across the land, collecting different types of items that can be useful to the player. This is the star of this devlog together with the new player house, because it showcases what I mentioned about using UI elements without breaking the player's immersion and control.

You can check a demo of these interactions below:

Full spell crafting process:

Merchant interaction:

Talking about the "code" itself, when I develop these kind of interactions I tend to make them as abstract/generic as possible. In general it requires more work for it to start working (as oppose to simply putting things on the map and programming a single use-case for the interaction), but I think it is worth it for the flexibility. The merchant for example can be easily customized with any inventory (items, prices, availability) and the dialog lines are a list that can be easily customized for a number of other merchants in the game.

As I said, things are coming together nicely :)