Update: It's Friday evening so it's devlog time!
The GUI has been redesigned and is now much better. The biggest change is the design -- everything is packed more tightly and designed to get out your way so you can focus on your moon mission. Some functional changes are:
-The addition of the "food pocket". Putting a consumable in this lets you eat it quickly by pressing 'q'. (The different keyboard layouts are supported, so its 'a' in azerty and an apostrophe in dvorak.)
-You can now pick up items in the gui by either clicking them or pressing the mouse and dragging. The drag-mode is quicker for quickly tidying up. You can still right-click to pick up half the items in a stack.
-The hotbar is now a separate inventory panel, you can drag and drop things from and to there when the inventory is open.
-Clicking the moonman face toggles the inventory (also 'e' still does that).
-More tooltips! Hovering over an empty slot tells you what it is (e.g., "armour slot", "food slot"), and hovering over an item in a crafter tells you what ingredients it needs in the tooltip (as well as in the grid.)
-Zooomable! You can change the gui size from within the game.
-Item counts and hotbar shortcuts have been visually separated.
-New (placeholder) health bar style
There's some space in the design and a few blank panels, eventually they will fill up with quest tokens and other bits of information. There's still some things to be done in terms of design and colours, but I suspect the gui in the final game will look very similar. I'll try to push the new gui out to the alpha soon so anyone interested can have a play and see if it all works ok. I'm moving on from the gui now, but there are still some important things to do:
GP and I have also been working on some fun creature concepts. Now that we're creating content I don't want to spoil too much, so I won't be showing too much. But here's some of the harmless terrestrial life that will be spread throughout the game. Little bugs, snails, bees, slugs and moths.
Over in
another thread a few of us were discussing an interesting game mechanic we called the 'junk forge'. The basic concept is that there will be an object or NPC that you feed junk too -- basically anything you don't want, dirt tiles, left over lumber, etc. Once you feed it enough then it reacts in some way, giving you some small reward or possible causing strange totems to appear in other areas.
Slightly off-topic, but I've also been playing around with a generative sound tool called pure data. I successfully got it embedded in a simple SFML program. In pure data you create sound programs by visually arranging and connecting up filters and generators and other elements. I spent two evenings and built this 303-like synth. I've done a little audio programming in the past (I worked on a sound library called Beads) but it was a lot of fun to come back and play around. I'm super interested in procedurally-generated audio for games, and games like Fract have successfully incorporated pure data. I look forward to playing with this kind of tech in the future .. but it won't be a part of Moonman (in a real-time sense).
Anyway, that's it for now!
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