Saturday 24th:
Started doing some of the ground work to get the Religion industry up and running.
Added Mana, sorted it for saving and loading.
Added (in theory) the Cultist Clothes, Effigy and Arcanizer objects. Programmed the clothes, made the Humans use the Effigy.
Programmed the Arcanizer, ahead of programming what a Spell actually is. Sorted saving the spell which I think will just be a String.
Programmed the very simple spells in a common function 'CastSpell (string Spell, GameObject Target)'. Lie puts the Human Mood to 75. Euphoria at 150 and Reveal Truth at -150.
Did a few more of the things to get this industry working. Did a few of the more complicated spells like Cupid's Shotgun. Doing them as they come to mind.
If I haven't explained already, the reason I'm doing this now is because I think the Spells will be powerful debugging tools.
Going into the Processor script and tidying it up as much as possible using common functions. This is pretty non-urgent stuff but hey it's saturday. I'll make a better plan on Monday.
Programming 'Spells' class, which is going to be more than just a string in the end to make it easier to manage costs and later thumbnails.
Sunday 25th:
Doing more stuff as it comes to me in a stream of consciousness kind of way. Finally getting to splitting up the 'Object Menu' into separate scripts to make it easier to use and edit.
Got rid of some strings, replacing them with a proper cached name. Mainly for tidiness.
Not sure why I'm doing work on a Sunday. It's usually a bad idea. To be honest I'm having fun. I guess I have a sense of relief having released a stable build that I think is ready for Early Access, and now I feel confident to really dig into the code with no remorse and make some big improvements.
Lots of cleaning up the code.
Made a list of objects I need from Maya. Turns out I already made most of them, but still I listed the ones that had slipped through the net. Going to wait a little longer before cracking out the Maya again.
Made placeholders for the new Buildings and Objects I made over the last couple of days, plus the Feeder.
Drew a rough design for 'Arkanos' the Client who will handle magic.
Wrote dialogue for Arkanos and the outline of his quest progression.
Monday 26th:
Animated the Feeder. Very simple animation for now since I would really like to improve this object in the near future.
Took it easy since I did a lot over the weekend. A lot of thinking. Started the day by going to the beach, 1 minute from my new flat (yes, I am a jammy bastard), and finally going for a proper swim into the deep end. You know when you go running for the first time in a while. You're having a great time. Then suddenly, you realize you're a 33 year old smoker who spends both work and leisure time at a desk, and reality hits you like a ton of bricks. Your legs turn to jelly and you have to gasp for air. Ok, imagine that, but when it happens you're actually a good 5-10 minutes of swimming from anywhere you can rest. It was terrifying. So simple, so silly, but for a good while there I felt like I might die. Treading water was too difficult in those waves, so I was just losing energy like that. I did manage to lie back and float for a while, like my grandfather taught me, and it worked, but I was worried that I might be getting pulled further out like that so I got back to swimming quickly. So I realized I would have to swim back even while my tar filled lungs were filling with mucus and begging me to stop. They could not send more oxygen to my muscles, which were torturing me to force me to stop. Full on break down of the body, but with nowhere to put my feet. I even ended up swalling a bit of water, which didn't help the panic. When my foot finally touched the ground, it was glorious. I actually felt like the guy in Subnautica when he first gets to land, and thought about how screwed I would be if I got attacked by a spider crab thing. I literally just sat there on the rocks like a beached whale as my arms and legs turned completely into jelly. My muscles wouldn't move, so I had to sit there and get punched in the back and pelted with rocks by the waves. After a minute or so I pretty much crawled to where my bag was and collapsed again. Then, a couple minutes of rest before I realized that I would need water very soon. So, I climbed up the near 45 degree hill back home and, like everyone's favourite politician, called an early lid on the day.
It was pretty cool.
Tuesday 27th:
Programmed a few more Spells, including 'Rend' and 'Grow Hair'.
Implemented Beard growth.
Reduced range of all audio sources a bit. This should help until I can hire a sound designer.
Drew the new Client Arkanos and gave it to Maly for scanning.
Added my placeholder Arkanos scene which I wrote over the weekend.
Ok I think I've just done a much better version of the 'Connect Transports' script and wired it up nicely. That was much much quicker than I thought. We'll see if it actually works.
So I've got myself a nice list of things which I think may take up to a week to safely implement into the game. So we'll see if this ends up being a day one patch. Mostly just testing and fixing and making sure everything I've been doing lately is working. Lots of small and tricky things. This will clean up my to-do list.
Then after this it's Mating, Painting (wall and floor textures), floating texts, Voices, and then on to the rest of the content starting with Cooking.
Friday 30th:
Took a couple days off to play Vermintide 2. What? Yes, I'm a developer, I can do that.
Pressing play and dealing with all the bugs that come up. The first big one is that Humans don't remember their Head/Eye/etc styles. So, in order to preserve existing save files, I'm putting a thing that will default all of them to a basic style if I get a null. This will be a problem if it occurs late game if the player cares about these styles (which they may do with future mutations), but it better than crashing on loading an old save file.
Amazed that the new Transport code is working great with no bugs (yet visible). Got the game basically going again after all this new stuff and restructuring.