Soulash 2 Devlog 5 - GUI: World & Equipment

Greetings fellow gods,

Yet again, a big chunk of progress this past two weeks. I must be in the happiest development stage as I can't get tired of grinding! At the end of the last devlog, I mentioned going after the progression system next, but as I pondered how to bite it, I decided to make a little detour first.

I focused on the first two menu screens. I began with the World Map screen, where we would see the map and plan our travels. It now looks like so:

At the top, you can see the menu tabs currently planned, and today we'll talk about the first two - World Map and Equipment.

On the World Map, we have a section to the left where we'll see known information about the selected tile, like the name of the location, population, known buildings, combat-related entities that belong to some Company, and the town's wealth. Then we'll have a section describing non-settlement information, like which State faction controls this location, coordinates, precipitation, temperature, and known resources. The resources will be hidden initially, and there will be ways to discover them through exploration or special abilities.

At the top right, you can see the date time indicators to see the passing time during travel, and above the map, in the middle, you can see the first 3 functional buttons that will help with zooming in & out as well as moving the map back to the player after skimming through the world.

The screen is now functional and I've combined it with the procedural generation systems responsible for creating region maps, which means we can travel to any place in the world and enter it. It will generate the area, spawn actors, if there are any currently at this world position, and save everything on the hard drive.

Since I've mentioned the save system, I've significantly changed the way saves are made for Soulash 2. As you might know, the first Soulash saved the whole region map, including the player and actors, in a single file. Since it has a consistent open world that's being reloaded in the background as the player travels it, that solution made sense. Still, it had some issues, like inconsistencies caused by a crash during such reload. For example, a new region could have been saved with the player character, while the previous one didn't save without it, creating a copy.

In Soulash 2, the player character and their items are now in a separate file, same as all other actors in the world that have their own file. They are all stored outside the region file and only saved during the playthrough. This change opens up a way to keep simulating the essential actors worldwide as time moves forward, moving them to other locations, making them chase their own goals, etc. It also opens up the possibility of detaching the player character from the world and continuing the story with a new character in the same world when the previous one dies.

I was thinking of ways for the permadeath to serve a higher purpose than just having high-stakes combat and repeating procedural content, and I plan to deepen its connection to the existing systems. For example, the aging mechanic, I'm thinking of ways to fast forward the time when the player studies books, trains somewhere, or heals grave injuries so a character will eventually get old and die. I believe something like this would make an interesting dynamic since, for example, humans will live shorter lives than elves. They will be more driven to use their time efficiently and feel a stronger pull toward necromancy to prolong their life. But this also allows us to play as a relative of our previous characters and use necromancy to learn from them.

But let's return from the distant dream world to the existing world map. When a player gets to their desired destination and decides to enter the region, one of two things will happen. The game generates a new region map and preserves it in a separate region file so it may load again in the future. Or we load an already saved location, choose the actors currently in this location and activate them by simply assigning the Actor component, qualifying these entities for the regional AI processing system.

One important thing to note is that it won't be possible to leave the region map at any time. We will have to move to the edge of the region map before leaving it and going elsewhere. Now obviously, backtracking from a deep dungeon would be annoying and time-consuming, so there will have to be a way to avoid that, but leaving at any time would be way too easy to avoid danger.

Now let's look at the second tab, the Equipment screen.

It's very similar to S1, just reworked for the new GUI while keeping all of the functionality. You can see some additional sections with secondary stats like movement speed or health regeneration, the attack speed of both hands, and the damage is not summed up between two hands anymore since it was very confusing for many players. Eventually, some of these improvements will also find their way to Soulash, but I'll allow myself to work on this more before that happens. I definitely want to add a secondary weapon set for quick swapping between ranged and melee.

For this screen, my mind is racing with new ideas for even more slots, like a tail for some races or unique parts of the body like crab hands that could be upgraded but lock one of the weapon slots. It's still too early to work on the details, but I'm so excited I can barely resist working on it right now! But I have an excellent system that lets me get the job done with very high productivity, so I've just thrown these as new tasks into the depths of the backlog for now.

And that will be all for this devlog. As you can see, Soulash 2 is slowly starting to take shape. It's still a long way ahead, but it's moving along at a high pace. I'm beginning to see many more details in my head as to how all of the systems will connect, and I can't wait to solidify and show them to you. I've already started working on the Skills screen, but as I'm fleshing out the system during the next two weeks, maybe another detour into crafting or a new dialogue system will be necessary. But either way, exciting things ahead!

Devlog 6 Progression System is now available: https://www.patreon.com/posts/69116373