It is already the end of April, which is rather alarming. I feel like the month just disappeared but that’s nothing new. I was hoping things would be a bit different by the time we reached the end of the month, but it is what it is. As such this will probably be a shorter update.

As you might remember from the last update there is a change happening to the player house interior. For a brief refresher, in most games (that I know of) like this you can upgrade your house to expand the interior. Generally speaking, this means another room is added onto the layout, or perhaps an existing one is made larger. The point being that every player ends up with the same house layout.

I thought this was something of a missed opportunity so I took it upon myself to try something different. What me of the past didn’t account for was just how complicated this would end up being. I tend to convince myself that complex systems won’t be too hard to code, its admittedly a fault of mine.

I was hoping that I’d be done, well, before the month was out, or at the very least by the end of the month. As you can probably guess by reading this, that didn’t happen. However, I am close. I expect maybe another week will be needed to get everything finalized.

As some of the details were a bit up in the air during the last update I’ll explain a bit of how this works. Instead of getting quests to upgrade your house like in the current version you’ll instead have an option to construct a room via the same shop you would use to build a coop or barn.

When you choose to build a room you’ll be taken to your house interior and expected to cobble together a layout for said room. This layout is constructed by basically painting floor tiles with your mouse or controller. As you paint tiles the walls and ceilings adjust accordingly. This process is capable of creating a room of any shape and size as long as all the floor tiles you place down are connected. There is only one stipulation at the moment involving the placement of interior columns close to the top of the room. I’m going to go back and see if this can be adjusted though.

Once you lay out the floorplan for the room you move to the next step which is placing doors on the walls of your room. You can place as many or as few as you want. Although you do have to place at least one because…well, I mean, you have to have a way in. After doors are placed, you finalize the room and are done. There will be a period of time where the carpenter will build the room out and then you can use it like any other. As far as pricing goes, I haven’t decided on a static price or one that varies based on the size of the room. Since you could technically just make one massive room the size of the whole house it seems like it might be a better option to make the price vary to keep balance intact.

Each room will be capable of having its own wallpaper and floor tile pattern. There will also be an option to modify any existing room which functions the same way creating a room does. While I haven’t coded it yet this should be able to account for furniture existing in the room. I have an outline for this that I believe should work. I think I’ll likely add a step to room modification as well that allows you to move existing furniture so you can just do everything at once if you want.

I think this is going to end up branching into coding furniture a bit as well. The ability to place down furniture already exists in the game but it was done basically as a way to allow placing a chest so I could test that. There is likely some extra stuff that needs to be addressed to complete the system. For instance stipulations to let you place things on walls or on top of tables.

That’s sort of the direction things have been going this month. I’m really hoping that I’m correct and I’ll get the rest of this sorted over the next week so I can move on. There’s plenty to do and I hate to just get stuck in on a single feature. At the same time, I suppose its quality over quantity.

I was going to attach a short video showing the system off a bit, but I think I’ll probably wait until next month. The house interior is still in testing mode meaning I’d have to stage a lot of stuff just to show things. Better to just wait until the system is complete I think.

Aside from that there has been some formulating on a few other topics. The one that has seen real growth however is the lore. I believe I mentioned last time that I would be taking weekends to write world lore for the game. For those unaware I work on programming the game Monday through Thursday. My weekends are always pretty scattershot in terms of how much time I have. Since it was hard to get any meaningful amount of time dedicated to coding on the weekends I thought it would be better to handle writing during that time instead. I can report that things are going well. I’m really not sure how much of this lore will be used but I think its helpful regardless. I won’t claim to be a great author but I think even if you aren’t going to directly reference all of your lore just having it can inform characters in the world and help to make them feel more complete.

I believe I’ve said before that I never really cared about the characters or worlds in these types of games. I’m hoping to avoid that with this game. Hence why there is also something akin to a main story. You won’t be forced to interact with it in any way, but it will be there if you want to pursue it. I guess its sort of like Skyrim. You can do the main quest if you want, or you can just do whatever you want. I’m hoping between this and everything else that the world will be a bit more gripping.

As for what was actually written, lots of kingdom lore honestly, along with some of the larger events in history. There are 5-6 separate nations depending on how you look at them each has their own lore, practices, themes, history, wars, etc. I’ve been thinking that whenever I finally finish this game I might just keep making games in this universe. Sort of just setup this base world and use it for different projects.

Anyway, my only other thought was if I should be sharing any of this lore. I don’t know that it would make sense in these posts. I could always start up another monthly post more dedicated to just dropping lore bits. I have no idea if anyone would find that remotely interesting, just an idle thought I had. That aside I’m also not sure if it would be good to just drop lore like that instead of working it into the game for people to just discover naturally. One of the things mentioned a long time ago by a player was that it would be interesting to be able to interact with things in the world like bookshelves to get bits of lore. I do plan to add that feature so there should be plenty of places to insert lore.

So several things to think about, but that’s hardly new for me. For the moment, I think I’ll cut things off there. I’m sorry that there isn’t much to share. The custom house layout system turned out to be quite the undertaking. With any luck I’ll knock the rest of it out in short order and I can move on to other things for May. Thank you as always for your patience, hopefully a month from now I’ll have a variety of things to talk about.