Day 16 — Crafting System Foundations

Context

Today marked the beginning of one of the largest and most important systems in Island Crossing: Crafting. This feature ties together nearly every other gameplay loop—gathering, tools, resources, progression—and will become a core part of the long‑term player experience.

Rather than trying to implement everything at once, I split the work between the AI Agent and myself so progress could happen in parallel.

System Architecture & Requirements

I began by outlining the full set of requirements for crafting, including:

• Crafting recipes
• Required ingredients and quantities
• Output items
• Crafting stations
• Crafting UI flow
• Validation logic
• Inventory integration
• Placement and pickup behavior

The list is large, but defining it early will reduce rework later.

Parallel Development Workflow

To keep things moving efficiently:

• The AI Agent began implementing the backend logic and data structures.
• I focused on building the UWs (User Widgets) that will form the Crafting UI.

This separation made it easier to work iteratively without blocking on UI or logic dependencies.

UI Work

I created the early versions of the UWs that will handle:

• Displaying available recipes
• Highlighting required materials
• Showing the player’s current inventory
• Crafting confirmation flow

Most of these are placeholder visuals, but they establish the overall layout and structure the system will build on.

---

Summary

What I accomplished:

• Defined the full requirements for the Crafting system.
• Began implementing Crafting backend logic via the AI Agent.
• Created the initial set of Crafting UI widgets.
• Established a parallel workflow to speed up development.

What I learned:

• Large systems benefit from early requirement gathering to avoid rework.
• Parallel work between UI and backend is effective when the system is well‑scoped.
• Crafting will likely be one of the most interconnected systems in the project.