Since the last update I've achieved a few more minor milestones towards "prettifying" the game, but also added some core functionality.

I apologise for getting this update to you a week late, I was feeling a little demotivated and burned out and decided to give myself a break rather than force through an dev log update.

But, we're here now - let's get on.

Character actions

I want players to be able to interact with lots of things in the world, in lots of different ways, even - or perhaps especially - if it's mundane.

One of my favourite games as a kid was Dino Crisis. In Dino Crisis, you could look at everything in your environment and it'd tell you something about it.

Sure, sometimes it would tell you is that the thing you're looking at is unremarkable, but it'd also often give you a little detail about the world that built the narrative and immersed the player.

This is also true of table-top games. When a GM describes a room as having a threadbare carpet and cracked walls, they're immersing the player in the world around them, but they're also giving the player the opportunity to look into the cracks.

With this in mind, there are some interactions I wanted to build first.

• Walking
• Examining objects
• Interacting with objects

These are the ones I'm going to focus on now, but there're some more I'd like to expand into.

• Using items on objects (use "key" on "door")
• Using items on items (use "magnifying glass" on "map")
• Attacking objects (e.g. breaking down doors, opening crates)
• Searching nearby (finding traps, find hidden doors)

Anyway, to do these things, I needed to handle mouse events with a script.

When you click (left or right), a ray is cast from the camera to wherever in the map you clicked. Every time it collides with an object, depending on the object, a new potential action is created and added to our list.

For example, if right-click on a section of terrain, the script will create a walk action and add it to the list. One all the actions have been gathered, a message is sent to the HUD that says "the actions are available".

Now, I needed to present the actions to the player. I created a UI component for that, that upon receiving a list player actions generates a UI for them to choose.

I chose a radial menu because I liked the way it looked, but there are some issues...

Multiple objects If you happen to select multiple objects with your click, we add the actions for all objects. This is fine, but as the action description on the menu only shows when you hover over the action, it's not clear what each action is.

I could solve this by displaying the object next to the icon, maybe, but it might not look good.

Actions limit I've allowed for up to 8 actions to be displayed in the radial menu and I could probably squeeze a few more into it if I needed, but I think it's going to fill up fast.

A solution might be (and a solution for the issue above) might be to limit the radial menu to displaying the actions for one object only, but this might present some usability issues.

Pathfinding

Now that the character actions were working and displaying, I needed implement pathfinding.

When you select the "Walk here" option in the radial menu, we send a message to the server that says "I would like to walk here".

The server does a few things. First, it calculates the optimal path. I've used Godot's A* pathfinding implementation for this.

As an aside, I actually didn't like Godot's implementation of A* pathfinding. It's a little bizarre. It involves adding every tile and all of their options up-front. It works, but it's not super intuitive and I might do a custom implementation.

Secondly, the server sends a full path down to the client. Once the client receives this, the game gets to work on animating and moving the character across the map.

Finally, we queue up a bunch of events that up the characters position over the course of the next several seconds.

This ensures that the character's position doesn't get out-of-sync with the server.

I've had a few issues with this approach, for example, it's goes a bit crazy when I select "walk" here when I'm already walking. BUT, it gets the job done for now. I'll optimise this in the future.

Animations

I don't have character models yet, so thinking much about animations seemed a bit silly, but what I did want to do was prove the concept.

Characters are going to have a bunch of animations and I need to be able to set and control them from the server. In my client, I created two animation. Walking and Standing. When walking, the character wobbles from side to side. When standing, the character bobs forward and backward.

Finally, when the character starts walking, the server sends the client a "Walking" animation notification. When the character stops walking, the server sends the client a "Standing" animation notification.

WorldBuilder changes

Whilst I'm not ready to show these changes yet, I've began work on my WorldBuilder tool. It looks a bit like a grid-based graphing tool.

It'll allow me to create maps, places objects, adjust terrain and much more by simply drawing the things I need onto a graph.

I had a dream about merging this tool into the server tool and being able to run the server straight from the WorldBuilder and watching players move around in real time. I toyed with the idea and then gave myself a stern talking to. Focus, Sam!

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For now that's all. I apologise that there isn't much to show off, but many of the things here are hard to express in screenshots.

If you enjoyed this post, please like and comment!

In my next post, I'll be talking (and showing you):

• The new toolbar (For inventory, outfitting, etc)
• The new inventory screen
• The start of work to make my game "deployable"
• Preparing to have a live server that you can joi

~ Sam