Hello, and thank you for reading this.

I know I don't have much publicly available for this project yet, but I am working on a playtest for the first part of the game: blade smithing. I hope to have it done soon, but for now I will be posting on my progress here. With each part that gets done, I will make a post for anyone interested in the development of this game. Anyways, thank you for reading this, and I hope you enjoy the ideas I've been working with on this project.

So, what have I been doing? Well, I first got a temperature simulation working in godot for the forge. Currently, you can start off with a stack of wood, and add one piece into the forge at a time. The wood takes time to catch fire, then heats up to its base temp. As the fuel heats, that transfers to the forge, and from the forge to anything in the forge (a crucible or metal ingot that you may be hammering). This took a while to figure out exactly how it works, but I got the math worked out and have this much working. The math also works out pretty neat that the player can add fuel to lower the temperature in the forge for a time. The bellows was also added to increase the burn temperature of the fuel, giving the player controls of both increasing and decreasing the forge temperature. I'm excited to use this later when I get to alloy making.

Next, I wanted the player to be able to process some ore into ingots. Little did I know the pain this would put me through. I got a crucible table working where when the player interacted with it, a UI would open up with the player's hotbar and the outline of a crucible would open. The player can click on the ore they want and it will get dropped into the crucible. After that, the player can either click confirm to keep the contents in the crucible, or move/click x to return all the ore into their inventory. This was the basics of an item system that I would later be banging my head against the desk for days to figure out.

Now for the actual processing. The player can pick up the crucible from the table and put it into the forge. So, the heat transfers like so:

fuel -> forge -> crucible -> ore

Once the ore gets hot enough, it melts into a single heap in the crucible. The player can then take it out and go over to the cast and make either an ingot or a pommel. 

That's about as far as I've gotten. It's been fun, but between the art, programming, and design, I've hit many bumps along the way. Lately, I've been recoding a lot of the game to simplify how items worked. I needed the items to have basic item data, be stackable in the player inventory, and hold all the functionality and data for each different item type. I need fuel to act like fuel, ore to act like ore, and metal to act like metal. So I've been designing and redesigning this system until it is something that I feel can work. Beyond this, I need the system to be highly dynamic, as the player will be able to make alloys later that won't have a set base data, but will inherit its data from the parent metals. I finally just settled on a base item class, but storing the item data in each component class, meaning I can create an item from any given component. I may run into issues later with this, but it drastically decreased the complexity of my code, so I'm gonna roll with it for now.

I've also been shifting my focus onto environment. I need good environment assets and player animations. I've poked around, and there is nothing quite what I am looking for online, so I think I'm going to have to make them all myself. Although that is probably for the better, I'm going to have to really learn a lot about pixel art before this game start's looking right. That said, I am hoping to really design the environment around some pretty dynamic lighting. With the forge, glowing metal, torches, and windows, I think there is a lot I can do to allow the player to feel the work they are doing in the smithy. We'll see what I can do though, so wish me luck.

This post is pretty long as I've been working on the project for a good bit now, but if I get into regular posting I don't think they will be as long. In the future it will probably be short posts regarding what I've gotten done and a little bit of images if I've been working on art. Hope you enjoyed seeing what I've done and I look forward to sharing further development next time.