Shops!

Long-ish time, no see! I am almost done with university, one quarter left! And since the last time I posted, I got a job as a software developer! Busy, busy.

Well, it's my "spring break" right now, and due to COVID-19, I've been inside. So I had some time to work on Ponyland, and shops are functioning in a basic sense!

 

Those piles of coins on the ground are my "shops," heh. The shopkeepers are Sweetberry Medley and Lavender Lilac.

Some goals I have since I've implemented this:

• Have each shop keep a stock of items that varies. Neopets did this; there is a random stock of items in their shop, the quantity of of each item varies, and therefore shops can sell out of items. I think this might be a cool concept because it means that the economy can vary, and indeed on Neopets, there were people who "restocked" items as a way of earning money and getting rare items. I wonder if I could set stock to "-1" for items that want to keep infinitely stocked, like some essentials or something. 
• Make it so when you buy an item, have some coin particles appear near the buy button.
• If you can't afford an item, maybe grey out and disable the buy button (but there's a check in place right now that won't let you buy something you can't afford anyways).  

Hmm, besides that, I'm not sure. I think saving the pony's appearance is still a thing to work on. And creating consumables to modify their appearance.

I could also work on Stella's interior, but that'd involve a lot of artwork.

I could try starting on networking, since I just finished a networking class at university. We made a poker game as our final project, and the class has helped me better understand how network architecture should work. Networking is still a really big topic to tackle, so I keep pushing it off.

It's been a while since I looked at my code, I'm thinking a good thing to do would be some code cleanup, and adding lots of comments, since the code-base is getting big.