Wednesday Meeting

Rather than the typical "Monday Meeting" post, we're going for a "Tuesday Meeting" post today (although the actual meeting took place last Wednesday... Confusion galore)!

Anyway! As mentioned yesterday, we've finally started testing the first version of the housing build, and immediately there were a bunch of things we decided had to change (or be added). Here's some of them:

* More house layouts, and varying sizes. From the beginning we thought it'd be enough to use this one layout, but we quickly felt not only did it feel a bit big, it's also a little boring to only be able to work with a single open space room. We also felt it was a little big. So, there will be an option to change between a set of house layouts, with a smaller room and multiple rooms available.

* A character who creates duplicates of unique housing items you already own. For obvious reasons! Unlike the items you buy in the store (where you can buy as many items as you like), there are unique items out there which you'll only be able to find one of. In order to be able to place more of these in your house, you'll be able to make duplicates of them - either at the regular store guy or through another NPC.

* We'll look into making the area around your house a little bigger so there can be some kind of decorations surrounding it rather than it being placed in the middle of nowhere (well, in the middle of Evergrind) just like that.

* A furniture section should probably be added to your character's inventory menu.

* The hand tool (which is used to move furniture around or delete it), is currently a long basic line/beam, and will be replaced with a pointing hand.

* The option to flip an item horizontally will be added to items where that feature makes sense, such as the pick-axe

* A mini-icon for furniture items that have more than one style. Styles are various skins of an object, and can be a color change or detail change in some way. For example, a bookcase might have different sets of shelves or stacks of items you can pick between.In order to make it more clear which items have more than one style, we'd like to add one of those tiny icons (like the 1H/2H/housing item icons in the main menu), only visible in the housing menu.

* When you place an item you have more than one copy of, you're able to keep placing more of it until you run out of that particular item. Currently, what happens after you've placed your final item of that kind is that you'll get automatically moved back to the menu again.

This, we quickly realized, felt a bit jarring, so next we'll try adding a sound indicating you've run out of the item when you try to place another one, forcing you to cancel back into the menu rather than automatically getting there. This might seem counter productive, as it means you'll have to press an extra button before being able to select your next piece of furniture, but we believe it'll be less annoying then the jarring feeling of going from moving objects around to changing between new objects in the menu.

* Visual- and sound effects for placing and deleting objects in your house. An outline around the currently selected object. A better icon for the wallpaper section, which currently can be mistaken for a floor texture. Sound effect and visual feedback when you try to delete an item you currently can't remove (for instance if it has other items on top of it).

* The currently not used star menu will be replaced with a settings menu, where you'll be able to save your current house, change between different lightning settings and house layouts and other things we might think of.

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...Aaand a bunch of other small things. As you can tell, when we add a new system things are far from perfect the first time around, and the only way of getting to that polished state is to change and add things until it feels nice :)

Once these things have been added we'll try the system out again and reevaluate!