Very specific rocks and rats

So the weekend is here and I get to have time to work on my game. My wife is off with friends and family and the football season has finished, so hardly anything to distract me. This week's been a busy week, but I did make progress in the quest system.

I already had some gathering quest mechanics. Now I also have movement quests. Furthermore I added a way to start and finish a quest. The only way to do that was to talk to an NPC. Now moving to a designated location can also trigger the quest.

Finally, I implemented something to have completing a quest make other quests available. While this is not finished yet, I could be used to guide bigger story lines. For instance, an NPC might send you on a quest to go somewhere and that location will trigger a gathering quest or another move quest. It still requires some work to finish it, but it's starting to work a bit and, like the enemy AI, to me it kind of feels alive already, which is a good thing. I do need others to share that feeling, because such things are deceptive.

Another thing: a gathering quest is now about gathering a specific object. That's fine when I need to fetch the Special Unique Sword of So-and-So, but when I need to gather a flower or a rock, I should not need to get that one unique one. A flower is a flower, so what I'll add is that a gather objective can either point to some specific object, or one of more objects with certain characteristics, like a tag or some information about the object.

Same will be with killing objectives that i'll add later. I can be asked to kill a very specific knight or a monster or something, but it can also be that we need to get rid of a rat. Rats are not unique, unless we're talking a special one. Once I have my combat system, I'll make sure that killing a generic enemy like a rat or a guard will trigger something else than killing a special character, like that one knight,

Also, There's the matter of marking where to go for a quest. Especially now that a quest could turn another quest from unavailable to available, there needs to be some sort of recognizable thing to tell the player a certain NPC might have a quest or a certain location might. For that, I'll probably use some marker near the quest giving object like an exclamation mark or some particle effect that I never worked with.

In the next week, I'm going to work on the GUI again. I would like to have my GUI for journal entries, inventory and quests first (in no particular order). Furthermore, I would like to refactor some stuff in my worldobject class. That'll make it more flexible and easily implemented, especially for the inventory. Here I also want to prevent the GUI to show "Flower", "Flower",  "Flower", "Flower" and "Flower" when I actually just have 5 flowers. An object is unique or it isn't. If it isn't, We shouldn't spend too much space on showing them.

This'll be useful for things like arrows too. I don't want the player object to keep track of 2000 individual arrow objects. I just need the game to understand this particular object is an arrow so that it will be stored as an amount so that the game might pull arrows from a pool. But that's for later.