There are a few more delays ahead, so I'm bringing out one more post with a lot of smaller updates.
First of all, I finished making some basic gameplay objects, like pushable boulders crates and levers, along with their basic functionality.
Following this up, I cleaned up the player character movement code, in order to make his movement more general. This allows for rotations and switching to other 2D planes.
And to top it off, I laid down the groundsworks for the conversation system, along with a meaty set of animations and facial expressions. This should be plenty to cover all interactions that will be in the primary demo.
With that, all the core functionality is in place, apart from the save/load/rewind mechanic. I have started work on implementing it, but at this point I cannot say for sure what will be feasible. I will have to find out how heavily the mechanic weighs on memory and cpu. In the worst case, I will have to resort to a classic save and load mechanic without any wonky time mechanics. For now though, I'm optimistic that the time rewinding will be possible to some extent.