After getting some feedback from the technical demo and watching a few players struggle to figure out how the game works, I've begun making some important changes to the game.

Firstly, I was using a simple 2d to 3d point conversion for the in game object selection. This worked well, but it lead to problems with taller objects (if you hovered over something large, the pointer would just go to the tile behind it 'passing through' taller objects), and it was really confusing to new players.

So I wrote a raycasting script that checks against a dynamic triangle mesh, now selecting things is WAAAAY easier!

(the red sphere being the collision point)

The next thing I did was add support for "random" floor tiles, which breaks up the repeating floor texture problem quite well.

I then worked on creating a fixed rendering pipeline to decrease the amount of texture calls I was doing. It wasn't much of an increase of speed on my end, but I'm positive on better computers using the full graphics settings, they will see a large improvement.

And finally, I wanted to try out some lighting in the engine (which I couldn't do before the fixed pipeline). It's only vertex shaded so far, and doesn't look anywhere near perfect, but I think it helps set a really interesting mood.

Chances are, the lighting won't be used unless I use a pixel shader.

Most recent screenshot showing the debug collision planes for the raycast object selection.

That's all for now!