2025-05-18 Loot and Crafting

This week was focused on adding more loot to the thax and implementing an inventory the player can use to craft & use potions from that loot. The inventory is a slide-in panel in the lower-right that contains both the inventory and crafting sections, separated by a draggable separator. Clicking a potion refills health, while clicking the potion recipe in the crafting area while attempt to craft a new one from thax parts. The recipe is currently indicated in the tooltip when hovering over the button, but will eventually be a slide-out panel of its own.

Staying consistent with my hatred of RNG, the loot system has a built-in pity score that ensures you'll eventually get the parts you want. Currently, the base chance increases by 10% (multiplicative) every time you fail to get a particular drop, and resets to base when you get the part.

Other notable (visible) changes:

• Implemented a "look-ahead" for the camera, based on player speed. This will eventually be tweaked to be smoother and more useful (e.g. zooming out as you reach high speeds).
• Doubled the spin speed of the thax's spin attack, so it's less likely to miss the player despite passing through.
• Added control instructions to the title screen. This is a hack-job to help out my pre-Alpha testers until I can get together tutorials and a proper controls screen.

Finally, some time was spent on reworking how the "Brain" for players and thaxes handles communication. The main aim of this rework is to make it easier to swap brains, allowing future work with cinematics, tutorials, player-character possession, etc. Unfortunately, this rework broke multiplayer syncing, so I'll need to fix that next week.