Iron Log #2

Hello everybody!

Over the last couple of weeks I've been busy working on some core parts of the game. Including some basic enemy AI, fuel based machines, and dragging and dropping items. 

The enemy AI is pretty simple at the moment. If they see you they will move towards the player and attack but you can easily run away. It's a bit of a learning curve since I've never done enemy AI before. In the future I'll be able to add more complex AI that responds to your behavior and attacks your buildings.

Fuel based machines like a furnace that uses wood or coal instead of electricity. This kind of machine will be used in the early game before you unlock electricity.

Item handling in the UI is a fairly complex area but I'm pretty happy with what's possible so far. You can view an inventory made up of X number of slots and pick up and move items to any slot. They can be stacked or swapped if the item is of a different type. I even have right click to pickup or drop half a stack. And if you click outside the inventory window it will drop the item into the world.

Last thing I wanted to share is I added belt splitters. In Builderment I went with a design where you had 1 input and 3 outputs, this is also what Satisfactory does. However for Belts of Iron I wanted to keep things simple so I'm going for a design with 2 inputs and 2 outputs, more like Factorio. This gives you the ability to easily split or merge belts with a single building at a simple 1:2 or 2:1 ratio. Except the splitter is larger in size, 2x1 instead of 1x1 if you will so I might swap this with a smaller 1x1 building with 4 customizable input/output connectors down the road. We'll see how this works for now...

Anyway thanks for reading!

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Join the discord to hang out with other interested players and the developer https://discord.gg/xmmPeZHj4T