Almost Didn't

Actually Didn't

Today's been a lazy one. I was exhausted all day yesterday, until it was time for bed. Then I just kept tossing and turning and barely got any sleep. Was woken early (for no good reason) and was just exhausted. So I wrote today off, I laid in bed, hoping to rest, watching YouTube all day. Still no sleep, not feeling rested, but I'm still here. So, I'm doing a little digging. Not sure how much I'll do, if I even do anything more than investigating what to do.

Preparations

Tomorrow, I expect to be stuck in a car for hours (it's like 2hrs each way, minimum). I can't exactly work on the game so much while on the road, but I can test and plan. So, today I'm planning for tomorrow's testing, or something like that. There's still a couple of missing pieces for mobile. The biggest is the dynamic action button. I have to figure out how to even make it do what I want. The show/hide portion is easy, it's the interaction part I need to figure out.

So, the first step is to look back at how I built out the original player interaction system. On the interactable, there's an "interact" function. So far, so good. I can just call that function, right? Well, I first need to know which interactable to call the function on. . . Where exactly does my "interact" input get consumed? After a big of digging, I couldn't for the life of me figure out where my interaction was starting, so I asked Gemini. And for once, it actually had the right answer! I'm not sure if it was just a good guess or if it actually knew, but I'll take the win.

Oops, I spoke too soon, it was just a guess, lol. Anyway, at least now I know where it starts. And, as seems to always be the case, it's not looking good. My "interact" input is consumed in the player character's physics process. And not only that, it uses an internal variable as a reference to the interactable target. Man, the entire player character needs a refactor, maybe I should just start there. Or maybe, I start with simply modifying the variable name (remove the underscore) and get the dynamic action button working for interactions the easy way.

Not Now

 No matter what I decide to do, it isn't happening today, or tomorrow for that matter. Well, that is if tomorrow's plans hold. It's possible we'll get rained out and stay home. If that's the case, I'll dive in and make something happen. But for now I have an idea of what comes next. I still need to work on the visibility stuff for the dynamic action button, some placeholder functionality for the quick action buttons, the inventory screen updates, the playerstats manager functionality surrounding the quick action buttons, the inventory manager updates for the quick action. . . The list seems to get bigger no matter how much I mark off. I guess that's part of being a developer. 

Luckily, I don't really consider this "scope creep" because I've barely scratched the surface of the game's intended scope. And I am truly limiting the scope of the vertical slice. There's going to be huge swaths of the gameplay I'm not going to even touch for a long, long time. Of course, Gemini can't seem to understand that, keeps pushing me to work on systems that fall way outside the current scope (like farm, factory, and space related stuff). But that's okay, it's still been a very useful tool up to this point, even with all the frustration.