Heya!
Grant me one last post on those choices and then I wanna try switching this devlog up a bit to become an actual proper log of what's been going on with the game, dev session to dev session.
So, after putting mad thought into what choices to give the player where I'm fairly confident that I got what I want now.
You got your third person view:
LOOK gives you the option to examine particular parts of the scene in a more detailed first person view. In this case, just CROSSROADS.
TALK gives you the option to talk to whoever is in your vicinity, triggering a conversation with them. In this case that'd be YENDOR, the skeleton carrying you around.
USE gives you the option to use whatever object of interesting might be around you or in your hand. If there are none and you ain't got none, GO will be in third place.
GO lets you go somewhere else.
In general, you'll be doing stuff in third person, be it going somewhere, using something or talking to characters.
If you pick LOOK > CROSSROADS, you got your first person view:
LOOK will now give you the option to look at whatever object of interesting might be around you, like AREA, SNOW, SIGN POST.
TAKE unlocks once you've looked at something that might be worth picking up, making Yendor comment on whatever you want him to pick up and picking it up if he feels like it.
BACK takes you back to the third person view.
Generally, you'll gather stuff in first person, be it information or actual items.
That's just a general rough setup, though. You're probably gonna get into situations where there's an object clearly visible in the third person view and that scene having a TAKE but no USE even though it's third person or a first person in which a USE makes more sense than a TAKE, so these options will kinda mix and match around. Maybe I might have a TASTE or SMELL instead of a LOOK sometimes, who knows.
Though what's import is that without an EXAMINE or EXPLORE polluting the very simplistic and hopefully easy to understand options you're given, being replaced by LOOK and BACK respectively, this should make for a much more streamlined experience. I just wanna keep the options as straight-forward as possible, so that you wouldn't even have to think about what they would do, also omitting a MENU or INVENTORY option, because that's something you'd have to get acquainted with first and I'd like to avoid having any sort of tutorial.
The way I'm planning it, you won't ever have an inventory to manage no matter how many items you come across, as Yendor's got two hands to hold stuff with, you occupying one of which, leading to there never being any sort of inventory save for one or two items, which will be presented to you if you pick USE in the third person view.
Or, you know, after all that analyzing 'n stuff I could also just do it like this:
or this:
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