Progress update 12/16 - Lore system!

What's this 'lore system'?

Howdy! The Peanut Village update's been out for about a week, and has had some great reception (especially the ??? new hidden feature). Thanks for the positive feedback!

I've jumped headfirst into one of the biggest tasks of the next update: implementing the lore system. (Quick WIP preview below! Right-click and 'open in new tab' to view the original size)

The lore system is a new way to interact with the world. You'll be able to use a "study" spell to make notes on local creatures and sights, and jot them down into your personal "grimoire".  Rather than showing one thing at a time, I'd like to present the book as an open-face UI, meaning you can see a left and a right page at the same time, and can 'flip through' it. It's written from the player character's perspective (including notes to self).

The book itself will hold a huge amount of information - data you've collected, quest notes, spell details, secret star completion, and so on - so there's a lot that has to happen under the hood to make that happen! Let's taco bout it.

It breaks down into 3 main components. I've already completed the first!

1. The book functionality: The game needs to be able to take my spreadsheet of lore entries and arrange them in a way that makes sense. I can't just have a list that you go through one at a time - some entries will be short and can fit two per page, while others need to run across both pages as a major entry, which also necessitates blank pages being inserted occasionally as well. There's a lot of logistics involved, and I've set up a variety of page layout formats to make sure no matter what I'm trying to do, it's going to lay out in a sensical way. (This is basically all done at this point!)
2. The visuals: This is a mix of some art for how the book overall needs to look, plus art for all the entries, plus a shader to handle page flipping. (I don't really know how to do more than the absolute basics with shaders, so I'm expecting there to be a steep learning curve to get this in place.)
3. The spell: I need to create the player ability to target things within sight and 'study' them. I also need to rig every enemy, as well as a variety of scenery objects, with something that the spell can use to know if it's selecting a 'valid' study-able thing.

So, once this is all done with, exploration will be substantially richer, as you'll be able to learn more about the things around you, and I'll be able to create a wider variety of exploration rewards by putting something with unique lore in a hidden area (for example).

It's the last major system the game is missing right now, other than some system settings stuff like key rebinding. Everything else I want to add to the demo will just be depth of content, like more rooms and enemies and secrets, oh, my! But we're getting there - nearly a perfect vertical slice of content that I can go crazy on content-building for in the future.

That's it until next time - don't forget to join our Discord for live progress updates and general hangouts! Expect more regular updates again now that I'm back at it :)