I have been hard at work building things out. Still tons and tons of work to go, but it is nice to see that a game is metastasizing even in a very , very primitive form. Perhaps this is the issue of being a novice programmer, and perhaps more expert programmers would have more 'first time go' moments programming different features, but I am not that person. Perhaps in ten years time I will be working on another project and discover it to be far more organic and natural to program. 

Ah well. 

In the past few months of development I had been building features in a fairly ad hoc fashion. While some attention had been paid to best / better practices of programming and responsibility, controls hadn't been one of those things. I had whatever controls placed in their relative corners of scripts, which made for an arcane sort of set up. This was fine for the time being, but the more "debt" you incur, the more expensive the interest. 

I spent most of the past week remapping everything to a controller, and more broadly using Unity's InputAction system to create a fleixble system. I was pretty excited I had even gotten a cheap SNES style controller of Amazon... but the arbitrary nature of its cheap programming had the buttons assigned in a strange order, which took some time to disentangle. I am going to have to create another control scheme for more standard PS5 / Xbox style controllers, but this works for the time being and that debt won't be significant. 

One of the design philosophies is to keep the controls simple enough that it could be played on an SNES controller. Given that characters will have "Field Abilities" that allow them to manipulate the dungeon environment (pick locks, push objects, shoot magical projectiles, sneak) this potentially means that many of the standard face buttons will be occupied. Currently, for example, I have "menu" mapped to 'Start', which just feels wrong. Perhaps its a non issue, but a creature of habit as I am, I am reminded how this was NOT the way JRPGs of the SNES eras accessed the menu. 

Im starting to work on my character sprites and character sprite overlay system. The intent is that each body type will have a base sprite sheet and all of the various options will have iterations of that sprite sheet that correspond to the  differences in body shape. I am predicting some level of issue with "clipping" for certain clothing types in the future, but hopefully I should be able to avoid most of the problems