Began adding the music and sound systems to MGS. They're implemented as separate systems, because one needs to play one thing all the time, whereas the other needs to play all the things one time. Since I'm building the game with an entity-component-system design, it's fairly easy to add new things quickly, but it's slightly harder to make sure each piece of the game only does the one thing it needs to. And does it right.

But at least with an ECS design, it's also easy to tear things out and replace them, so I'm not too worried about getting everything perfect at the moment. Maybe after I get the audio working, I'll add some level generation, or AI to the game. Hmm, decisions, decisions...

I'm just gonna drop this here.

Posting this now so I have to edit it when I get home and actually break out my game and do something. I've been playing a lot of GTA V and it is getting me inspired about my game again, but I don't know if every day progress is possible currently. I'd like to get back there at some point though.

The thing about GTA V, is that they have such a fun, rich city simulation, and yet the mission structure still hasn't changed very much. Go here and do this, go here and do that, and if you veer only slightly off course, the mission is a failure. My goal with Erik has always been to blend the "mission" or narrative elements with a simulation. It's not a simulation where you have to make up your own narrative, and it's not a narrative tacked onto a simulation, and it's not a fixed narrative where you can only do what the designer intends. It's both narrative and simulation at the same time.

I think my event and conversation system combo that I have going on now is still pretty stuck in if-then tried and true narrative structure. A lot of the code is in forcing the simulation elements to play nice with the narrative. I don't think it's the correct approach, but at the moment I don't have another. I think I would like to ignore narrative and work on some of the simulation elements some more independently, perhaps I can find a way to match up the two areas from a different angle.

Edit: So I added some extra options for the campfire. You can choose what item to use as fuel, with the possibility of burning anything logical and different items burning at different rates. You can also cook meat on the campfire, where the description of the meat item changes depending on it's cooked state. This is all easily expandable with all of the data stored in the json files.