Construction and UI

I've made slow progress over the past month, but I have made progress - which is something. In particular I've been been making underlying changes to the job system and UI in order to make development going forward a bit easier. I've also made a few fundamental changes to the way things are done, such as inventory management, which tied in with the UI changes.

The original plan for inventory was to have a system similar to most RPG games where you can carry a vast number of items and store things in chests, similar to this:

This is no longer the plan though and instead you will only be able to carry 6 items at first - the same as the AI. I think this is important to emphasise the fact that you aren't unique from the AI characters - you are simply one of the many cogs in the machine. By limiting to 6 items it also means I could make the UI a bit cleaner and remove the inventory bar from the bottom of the screen and move the expanded inventory to the right:

Whilst changing the UI I ended up creating a proper menu UI so that I could start moving away from binding commands to random letters on the keyboard and start implementing real menus. It's probably going to change a bit but ultimately it will look something like this:

These menus are all generic, meaning I can re-use them all of the place. The above screenshot also leads on to be being able to talk about the new construction mechanism. You will be able to choose a building to construct from the menus, place it down and then bring the raw materials to it and start building. The AI will also start doing this automatically and find the nearest materials (wood, stone etc.) and bring it to the construction site. Once all the materials are there then they will start building it. This is all in it's very early stages at present, but the basic mechanisms are all in place and it should be pretty easy to expand this system. I leave you with a small gif of what this looks like: