Progress update- making the hand work (Patreon)

I still haven't sorted out a good format for posts, or my stream. Working on it >.>; 

I really struggled to write something this week. That usually happens when I feel like I haven't accomplished enough for the week and don't want to come to my community empty-handed. Hence the day-late post.

I'm.... busy. There's a lot of IRL stuff to do post-move (I left Planet America and am chilling on the small island of Europe). My partner thinks I'm pushing myself and trying to take on too much. I feel like I'm not doing nearly enough. A lesson about hustle/grind mindset is hiding in this somewhere. There's so much to do that I can't hope to do it all even if I stopped working on SHF3 stuff. 

I haven't stopped, mind you.

What's being worked on?

Lots of interconnected things which are hard to say much about. I'm working on p*netration UX. As in, the series of clicks and UI elements it takes to make p*netration happen in the game. It involves many systems in the game, and I keep needing to work on side features in order to support very slow progress on the main quest. 

One such side feature is...

Game state.

It's a technical term. In a set of states, only one can be active at a time. The mouse can either be down or up. That sort of thing. 

In this case we just need to know the state of the player's "hand" when they click on the targeting area around a character's crotch. That triggers the aiming mode if the hand is in the right state. There was some weirdness with figuring out the state that didn't sit right with me, so I dove in to see if something was wrong with my design, and things began to spiral.

So... what states can the player's hand be in? I thought only four. Free, aiming with an item, using an item on an npc, p*netrating an npc with an item. This supported the aiming logic until I stopped to think about why it felt weird.

I mean, aiming can happen while you're trying to p*netrate. But only one state should be active at a time, so that can't be right. That's just one of several problems. So I expanded it to seven states.

But something was off again. There's still weird overlap between different scenarios that I can't quite resolve. You might be able to spot my logic issues. I finally sat down to fully map out the states that may have influence over what happens when you click on a crotch.

I just wanna click on pony ponuts. How is it this hard?

It's interesting to wrestle with something very basic and core to the game this late into development. I thought it was because of my inexperience building standard game systems. It might partially be that. But it's also a sign that the engine development has gotten far enough that I'm no longer spending all my time on math errors and whatnot. Now it's more about how to direct the engine to use all the ridiculous things I programmed it to do.

Yep. That's all for now.

I hope these small peeks into my madness are interesting. The fact that y'all not only read these posts but still maintain the interest and hype is mind-blowing to me. Many years into making this stuff, I still struggle to recognize the worth of my own work and ideas. I'm glad you people see it though. Thank you so much for continuing to fund this absurd thing we're doing <3