Juggling numbers and skills

I'm a little bit behind on where I wanted to be as far as progress this week but I've also gotten a ton of stuff done. So, first off...

The Skill System
I'm still in the middle of implementing this but the primary design stuff is done and it's now a matter of hooking it in everywhere. It's funny but the biggest design goal was planning for the player to be level drained. What I've come up with is sort of a combination of Fallout (the original) and Skyrim. At character creation the players origin story and attributes will determine the starting values of their skills. Then the player will also have the option to boost one skill at character creation. During gameplay at level up the player will receive a set amount of skill points that they'll be able to assign to whatever skills they want. (I toyed with a use based advancement system but with the level draining I think the grinding would become repetitive. This way, in theory, the player will be able to level in whatever way they choose and then assign those skills points where they want)

On being level drained the player will lose levels and a set number of skill points per level drained. The skill points will be randomly selected (because I don't want to have to keep track of every assigned skill point on level up). It will be possible for the player to be drained down to a zero skill level. At which point they'll be terrible at the skill and will have a chance of the skill backfiring or not working at all (most character origins will start the player at a base level of competency so they won't have to deal with these negative effects unless they end up being level drained)

So yeah, this will definitely take a lot of balancing and tweaking over time but I think it'll be a solid foundation to work from.

Oh and then there's the perks tree stuff that will act sort of like Skyrim or Fallout 4 where once the player has an adequate skill level they'll be able to unlock a perk associated with that skill. I'm still in the process of figuring the design on these out!

Bow and arrow stuff and Animation on equipped items
I finally have this working! Now the bow during firing animations will actually play an animation where the string is drawn back and the bow bends. I didn't realize this would be quite so strange to set up. But the good news is this is using a skeletal mesh that is separate from the player skeletal mesh and has a separate animation blueprint. Then I'm controlling those animations through a few scripting calls during animation / firing events. The good part about this is that I think this can be used for other animations and dynamic objects. I still need to do some testing to see if I'm right though before promising anything.

Redtree Shop and Quest Polish
This was mostly organizing and bug fixing some old issues that had been hanging around. There's also going to be a new shop next to the blacksmith that will sell seeds and farming tools for anyone interested in growing plants.

Shroom animations
Don't worry, I didn't forget about the animations and new scenes :)

Lockpicks
Lockpicks can now be bought at the blacksmith. When they break they'll actually decrease the amount of lockpicks the player is holding. If the player runs out of lockpicks then they won't be able to pick anymore locks!

And probably some other stuff I'm forgetting about too? But this progress update is already ridiculously long! So the plan is to finish the animations and finish setting up those scenes in game then get a base pass of the skill system in place and then put out the next build. It shouldn't take too too much longer (fingers crossed). Alright, back to work!