Doors now close, and I started transferring the first area from the design document into the game. The area is called "Hillside Penitentiary".

Our goal is to make the game fully functional before starting to seriously replace the graphics, which is why we  are using "Minimal Area Design", meant to control passability and game flow, without any cosmetics.

For instance, the cell where the player starts, has no bed. Bed is cosmetic, and so are the "angle smoothers" between perpendicular walls. The door, through which you talk to the guard, isn't. Neither are the walls themselves, as they are meant to contain the Player.

Someone asked earlier if we planned to have line of sight. Well, here it is. "True" line of sight, in an isometric tile-based environment, is limiting. It hides too much of what you're supposed to see, and creates ugly artifacts.  So instead, we use one more liberal with the concept of "line", while still hiding areas currently inaccessible.

The layout of Hilside Penitentiary is being created through the editor. LOS and other effects are disabled in the editor. It is a quite handy contraption, that automatically finds "similar" tiles to the one you're pointing at, and it has copy/paste and undo functions, as well. Those category columns are manually clickable, too.

Let the interesting times begin !

Doors now open as you walk into them (and stop being obstructive), and are examinable. However, closing them requires a different handler. Half of it is written, and half is not. 

Right now, by default, when you try to INTERACT with a door, you talk to its owner. It may or may not be a good idea. If the owner is dead, you get "There's no response."

Doors can be opened by walking into them (no security), talking to the owner through the door, using "Science" on them, or by carrying security items matching the door's requirements. Some of this functionality is still in progress. The latter example can be interpreted as either

a) standard security cards
b) as someone looking at you through a camera, spotting the said item (such as a specific armor), and letting you in.

Last week I guessed the manager would give me another pointless assignment. He gave me 4. Yet I persist.

I finished handling of picking up items from the floor when player is behind walls (that become transparent so you can see him & items at his feet). Inventory auto-opens if it was closed. It works almost perfectly. Also, found the right approach to serialization of doors. That is the only progress made this week.

Friday is deadline for "evaluation of my work performance" that happens every 6 months. Manager continues to terrorize me. Hopefully things will pick up after the "evaluation"... unless he gives me another assignment like the one I just completed. These assignments have no real use, he just comes up with them because they give him the sense that he matters.

Good day.

Items can now be picked up, for better or worse. This week has been a perfect storm - two different family events, manager at work bullshit, and dental visit.

Next - doors.

Then, the content-implementing fun starts. The point we've been working toward since, er, at least 2006. Although right now I'm too beat to fully comprehend it. Technically, though, Shelter was born in January 2000.

Proof: http://insane-worlds.8m.com/ (News page, first post) . Yes, that's our cooky website of that era, complete with two early screenshots. 

Items can now be dropped from inventory to the ground, and "used" (but not fired) without being in inventory, but I haven't finished the part where they get picked up. Sounds simple and trivial, doesn't it.

When the items are finished, then I get started on real doors ! Doors are important for controlling passability in a number of places. Far as the game's logic goes, each door will be tied to its "owner", and the skills needed to hack it will be compared against those of the owner (dead or alive, doesn't matter). Having "owners" doesn't make a ton of sense, but it is convenient for putting down multiple doors in a single area.

After the doors, I'll start migrating NPC/location/quest content from external document into the game. It will result in adjustments, for it is a learning path. 

In general work has been slow lately due to my equivalent of Lumbergh at work putting pressure on me about my equivalent of TPS reports. It is very hard to work at a software company and then work on software at home. It sucks all the enthusiasm out of you.

This need for generating enthusiasm is why we've been making Shelter videos. They're goalposts signifying progress and reminding us of why we're making the game. We were planning to make the next one when we have original graphics, but I just may release one when we have solid gameplay first. There hasn't been a decent video out in over a year.