This Week in the Forest! #128

YO FOLKS~! Here's the weekly!

Starting with a Word from Vixel!

7/25 weekly update:

Hey floofs, happy new week! <3 Last week I worked on v2, knocking out a few more todos! These four are done except for a bit of cleanup work I'll finish tonight.

• (done) Gifts: The dialogues are added, but the randomizer that triggers the gifts is broken.
• (done) Chapter Select Unlocks: Need database rules for which dialogues and movies get unlocked for each chapter.
• (done) Dialogue Prerequisites: Need to set up unlock sequence for new dialogues added since Booty Line Up (males).
• (done) Instanced Stories: Blessing of The Bells content is added, but it's showing up mixed in with Acts 2 and 3 dialogue.

This week I'll be focused on adding our Patreon build content for July. I'll keep working on v2 in any leftover time.

Remaining v2 todos:

• Camera Bugs: Most are fixed, but need to thoroughly re-test to ensure all v2 cameras match v1 cameras. Ruins Glyphs area cameras are broken.
• Critter Dates: Need to finish testing all triggers, especially for Coyotes date with bukkake scene, and Red's haiku.
• Autosave: Reenable and test.
• Cheat codes! (Overlooked these previously. Should be easy.)
• Final testing pass to make sure I didn't overlook any other features, menus or visuals.

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On my side I finished up the illustrations for this month, and finished up the writing. But I don't wanna spoil too many images, so I'll hold onto it ;)

I was doodling these just today though up above! We wanna rework a couple ways that you interact with the critters. We're gonna group together some interactions, and we're going to introduce a new one.

To give you an idea, this is how players can interact with a critter. Not including gossips.

• They've got a quest, or are apart of a quest.
• They have a gift for you.
• Contextually, they will have something new to tell you, but it's not related to a quest.
• If nothing else, then they will have their idle dialogues.

In addition, we had to navigate how the game would decide which of these responses have highest priority. And things get A LIL tricky when some of these are queued up at the same time. We've had a few "edge case" "not quests" that COULD happen simultaneously to other content, and things were getting messy. We had to navigate how the game will choose, and more so, how it would feel to the player.

Consider that the player could be mid-"non quest", leave, and come back to the game 3 months later. Talk to a random critter who happens to have a specific dialogue, and be totally clueless on the context. Since these were "not really quests" they wouldn't be in your quest log.

• SO:
  
  We decided to streamline some more of this content. Anything that has multi steps will BE in your quest log, just in case you need to look.
• We also decided that some content SHOULD be linear, much like our Blessing of the Bells "locked instance" - we decided to make some more of our mini chapters as locked instances. This avoids potential bugs, potential disconnects from the player coming back to the game at a later date, and keeps the experience contained.

(Some of these changes do "gamify" the game a bit more, rather than keeping things super organic. But "super organic" doesn't work that well when we consider all the possibilities of people playing our game. Like peeps binging stuff one character at a time. Or peeps taking their time going through the game slowly. Or gathering up all the quests first, then completing them all later. Having the game have a ton of queued up responses, and then blasting through all of them would be disorienting, and pretty UNorganic. Thus the changes!)

• We also decided to utilize the "Hey Rascal!" speech bubble more! We were thinking about adding a new "What's New" option in Gossip, so the critters could prompt a discussion for you. But the Hey Rascal option was much better and feels a lot more organic as well!
• Lastly, we wanted to rework the "Locked Instance" quests. This is a tricky thing because we don't want it to feel clunky, yet it needs to be obvious that certain things are disabled. In addition, I think a lock maybe isn't the most ideal representation for it. The name is WIP, but we wanna instead rebrand these moments as "Adventures" - And this will be a unique method to enter them as well.

The problem with our current "locked instance" quests - is that they are generally pretty long, and there was no warning that you were about to get thrown into one. A critter would have a quest, and BAM you're locked into this thing. So instead, we decided that a critter quest could lead to an adventure. Then the adventure can be chosen by the player whenever. 

The additional rebranding to "Adventure" gamifies the concept, and establishes a language and a "mode" so the player can expect certain things, like it being a locked instance, certain actions being disabled etc.

ALL OF THAT TO SAY, we will need some new assets to describe this Adventure concept, so I was doodling them today xD.

Game dev is nuts y'all haha, but it's super dope whenever Vixel and I sit down and tackle the problems we run into with our games feel/play.

The changes won't be in yet, but they are being worked into the v2.0 build of the game.

OK That's it! We'll try to get the next build out very soon! See ya!