So much progress... still so far to go!
1 - Character Interaction could use some real polish at this point.... and that's unfortunate because my story and instruction is primarily though this interaction.
2 - Since having implemented the Combat system I am enjoying it and it is working out well... I probably would have liked something a little more player friendly than it turned out to be (player doesn't always feel like he faces his enemies), but I'm working with a pre-built combat framework and the guts of it are beyond me to work out for now. But hey, it works!
3 - Collection system - the same combat framework I am using already had a built-in inventory and health system, but I didn't find the inventory useful or intuitive and there didnt' seem to be a 'currency' system I could find, so I hijacked the health system and built a small counter that way. (the Crystal count goes up instead of down (as previously health did) when you 'hit/touch' a crystal.
4 - A cool success was the implementation of the Crystal distribution! I didn't want to place 100's of them so they are randomly populated across the whole of the map, and once I did that the areas that felt sparce and empty now had slightly more purpose to visit.
5 - There are even now some "desert jackles" (which are really just the guards frome earlier with the mesh and animations replaced with a wolf model.... kinda goofy to watch the mismatched colliders in the editor, but the basic gameplay still works out.
5 - I also scratched an earlier 'carry' system with another. I started with a different approach for for the Package delivery quest. Again, it was a pre-built tool but part of a different framework I didn't end up using - it was breaking things and I decided to simplify things and just make my own basic version. Basic is never basic though and that took more brain power than I think it should have!
6 - Finally In general I also added in a ton of small improvements like several colliders.... fences and such, to keep the player from going off track. I added trigger areas to cycle Objects on or off according to progress and for optimization... and other such generalized "simple" improvements.
The crazy thing with all the work put in, it feels like the end result is a rather rough and bloated version of the game and in the end not quite like the game I had envisioned.