Redemption Harem - Crafting

If you've played the demo for Redemption Harem (and if you haven't, you can find the demo in the collections or over on itch), you probably ran into the very janky crafting system. While it works, it works in the same sense as the war map does in Maids & Masters; I'm using a massive pile of script to make the game behave in ways it normally wouldn't to get the result.

All that will be gone in v0.1, with crafting having been migrated to a plugin, complete with a Recipes tab in the menu that will list out which professions you've learned, what their level is, how much experience you've earned and how much it takes to get to the next level, and all the crafting recipes you know for that profession - provided I can figure it out, anyway. Currently it isn't correctly displaying learned recipes, but it's still a work in progress, and all those other features work, so it might be a "professions" or "crafting skills" tab instead of a "recipes" tab.

The crafting itself works just fine, though, complete with a whole new GUI that shows your success rates, the ingredients (both what's required to craft the item plus how much of each ingredient you have in parentheses), plus all the information you might want about the item, including what it does, some lore, what will happen if you fail or critically succeed, and - if it's relevant - when you can use it. The crafting window is also be set up so you can push F to bring up a filter. If you want to make a bow, you can push F, select Subcategory, then select Bows. No need to scroll past all the swords, staves, and spears to get there.

This all comes with its own leveling system that'll be much easier to keep transparent, too. Not only can you actually see the direct effect your skill level has on crafting, but I'll be able to implement things like buying books that you can then research to earn skill XP and learn new recipes, put skill checks out in the world to reward you for having put in the work, let you find improved versions of recipes that might have higher base chances to succeed or crit, and even alternate recipes that use tools instead of consumable ingredients or allow you to extract ingredients from failure instead of just losing all your stuff.

I'm not totally decided on how far I want to go with it, but I also have the option of automating some things in the game, like one of the party members being able to learn to cook themselves so you only need to worry about having the ingredients, and learning additional "professions" for gathering materials and getting more out of single actions as you improve. This is almost certain to impact how farming works compared to the demo, as that's one of the things that broke the game economy very quickly that I want to pull way back on.

It is still very much a work in progress, as I already have more than 100 items in the game between things you can craft, crafting ingredients, and tools, and all of that's taking me quite a while to fully implement and test. But outside of the occasional bit of implementation friction, I'm very happy with the system so far.