This week in the Forest! #59

Yo folks! Hope y'all are doing well! 

Let's start off with a Word from Vixel!

1/10 weekly report:

Hello all! <3 I hope you're having a nice January! :}

Last week I almost finished the Quest Manager redesign (it's about 90% now!) and divided a bunch of scripts into more manageable pieces. I wrote about 1000 lines of new code, and reviewed & modified another 3200 lines.

I added a new service to help prioritize which dialogue to play when you use the Talk interact on a critter. There's a bunch of rules that dictate whether a critter should announce a new quest, remind you about a quest you already started, help solve another critter's quest, or shoot the breeze with idle chatter. These rules are neatly organized in the new prioritizer service for easy maintenance. (Previously these rules were a part of the Quest Manager, but it was getting too bloated so now it outsources the work.)

I also introduced a service to track all the saveable data about critters, including if they're on a date, giving a gift, and the history of where they've last spawned (we need spawn history for something we're doing in the future with the Map of the forest that Penny gives you). The Quest Manager was tracking all this data before, but since the Spawners need it too (to decide if a critter should spawn at their home location or by Maverick's shop for a date, for example) and since it's easier to construct savegames with the data all in one place, it's generalized into its own script.

Now we've got:

A new database to easily model actors, quests, dialogue, triggers, and how they're all related.

New spawn scripts for critters, art and interactive objects.

More reliable save system design.

A dialogue service to streamline how other scripts play conversations.

Streamlined building blocks (art, triggers, colliders) for level design.

A tagging system that lets me find all the places certain assets are used.

- Performance improvements including breaking up large textures, Sprite Atlases for faster framerate, and texture compression for our Itch builds.

We still need to:

Rewrite fast travel.

Finish bringing in all the menus, art, Acts 1-2 triggers and dialogue from the old project.

Adapt older scripts (especially Notebook and triggering scripts) to use the new spawners and dialogue service.

Start on Act 3 content.

This week I'll be going ham to see how much of the remaining Acts 1 and 2 content I can get ported over into the upgrade project! I expect a lot of this to go smoothly, but it's a mountain of work, so we'll reevaluate progress next Monday. See you then! :}

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My end - I FINALLY GOT GLASSESSSSS YASSS! I know, this sounds ironic that I got surgery 2 months ago to not need glasses, but really it was to reduce the hardcoreness of my glasses lmao. So a month ago I healed, and a few weeks ago I put in the order for new lenses AND HERE WE ARE, I can fuckin' see in HD, I was damn overdue lmao. I guess the first thing I decided to do was my TAXES? CoOL. Glorious HD Taxes.

OK, aside from that I've been workin' more on the winter event. Sketched out a few more scenes, and painted above! This scene has a few more critters involved, it's pretty fun |3

I'll be poking away at more seasonal shiz while also prepping for the Act 3 stuff. Most of it's pretty squared away, but there's a few assets and choreographing that needs to be done.

Anywho that's it from us! 

See ya guys next week!