Welcome back!  I don't have a great deal to\ report this week, but I did manage to get the codebase closer to human-readable.  As an example, in the short video above, I click on the vending machine and there is a nice menu transition.  I wanted a few things for these menus: 

• To be modular, so I can use the menu system for diegetic spaces ( inventory handling, or conversation, or shops, etc.), as well as conventional spaces (title screen, options menu, etc.)
• To be as plug and play as is possible.

This proved to be a bit more challenging than expected.  I was running this game with a Deferred rendering path, but only recently did I realize that this render path cannot stack cameras.  Initially, I considered just using a camera projecting onto a render texture, but I'm more than a little inexperienced in the space, so I found it challenging to keep the visuals from becoming a mess.   For now, I ended up switching back to a Forward rendering path.  This allows for camera stacking, though with some additional restrictions.

I also spent a chunk of time on the lighting and working through my "UV rules" - and now I'm fairly happy with the quality.  There's more optimizing to be done, but after some stress testing, I suspect it's good enough for now.  Interactive objects now have their own base class  and can communicate with all other game junk through the Game Manager.  In any event, I'm rambling, but I can't wait to show you what I get to by next Friday!  

Feel free to leave a comment, idea, or question,
Eli

(P.S. please ignore the awful frame rate, I wanted to produce a quality video but it's late, and I have some things I have to get to tonight.  As such, this is really just a highly compressed gif turned into an mp4.  Starting next week I'll have a proper video to go with each devlog.)