Weekly devlog #13 - new wiki

Hi everyone! This week I launched the new wiki for crystal realms, and I have been working on the android version.

New wiki
After someone made a review of Crystal Realms, I realized how important having a good wiki is. If the wiki doesn't contain a lot of stuff, new players think that the game doesn't have a lot of stuff. So I decided to spend some time on making the wiki better. 

The first step was to move away from fandom. Fandom doesn't give a lot of freedom in how you stylize, so I decided to move everything to wiki.gg. Then I added every single item in the game to the wiki. Most items don't have their own page yet, but it still lets new players know that these items exist. I also added a custom background to the page, and I am planning to improve the style of the wiki in the future to match the game's aesthetic. But for now, this is a big improvement over the old wiki in my opinion.

Android inventory
I have made a lot of progress for the android version this week. I have added dropped items, the players inventory, the hotbar, and most imporantly: breaking and placing blocks. The breaking and placing blocks part was actually quite easy, but the hardest part was the user interface. Because the game engine I am using doesn't have that many UI features yet, I had to implement a lot of things from scratch. Like a container that is scrollable, or a text field.

And what makes this even worse is that I am making this UI for a touch screen, which can have multiple fingers on it at the same time! So for each finger, I had to track where it started, if it was doing a clicking motion, or if it was scrolling the container. (If you scroll down your inventory you don't want to accidentally select an item) And if two fingers pinch it should zoom in the camera, but not if those fingers are touching the user interface. As you might be able to imagine this was quite a complicated task, and I had to think of a bunch of edge cases. But it now seems to be working perfectly.

What's next?
One important thing about the Android version that I want to achieve is to make the controls feel very good on Android. So I want to add the "auto block select" feature from the pc version to Android. Also, the ability to customize your hotbar, like locking slots and clearing slots. After all of that is ready I will probably release it to the group of Android testers, in order to get feedback on how the controls feel.

That was everything for this week! If you are interested in becoming one of our Android testers, you can fill out this form.