This Week in the Forest! #57

Yo folks!

Here's what we've been up to this week, Starting with a Word from Vixel!

12/20 weekly report:

Heya floofs! Merry Christmas to you and yours! ^w^ <3

I've been doing more boring under-the-hood work improving old workflows and designs!

If you recall, the prior week I was breaking complex objects into the smallest possible pieces, which can then be programmed, combined or toggled on and off as needed - giving us extra flexibility in scene design and making scenes easier to maintain. Scarlett's garden for example is made of six objects: two colliders, two interaction triggers, and two pieces of artwork to get the fence to sort in front or behind Red when he walks nearby.

Last week I took a deep dive on connecting all those little objects to spawners in a coherent way. I was able to separate the spawn rules, trigger handling, and object factories into different easy-to-read scripts with a ton of sexy automation. (Crazy stuff like objects with placeholder slots for other objects, that get filled in during spawn; and a nifty tool that helps me find all the places in the project an object is used!) The automation reduces the opportunity for me to accidentally introduce bugs, since everything funnels through a small set of well-design control scripts. Whenever there are bugs, it's way easier to fix them in one place (or from a list of affected objects) instead of having to consider disjointed stuff scattered all over the project!

Next week between Christmas activities, I'll be working on cleaning up the Quest Manager, which is responsible for choosing which dialogue to play when you walk up to chat with critters.

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On my side, I've been cooking up a Winter Event for the game!

TFOL's main campaign takes place smack dab in the middle of summer, and Rascal hasn't been there too long... BUT I always thought it'd be neat to do some sorta holiday events. Most of these we'd be doing after the full campaign is done, and Act 5s patreon critters were well underway.

Despite that, I wanted to do a lil' something for the holidays and wanted to share some of it with y'all!

Here's a quick concept sketch of what we call The Blessing of the Bells :>!

Despite this being a winter event, it probably won't be in the game for a month or two lmao. BUT HEY, STILL WINTER. SOOO. IT WORKS??

Anywho most of my week was planning this event and doodling up a banner, which will likely eventually be used as a final asset during a story or something. No spoilers, but it's shaping up to be a pretty fun chunk of content :>

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Aside from that, I was also doodling up some additional assets we'll have for Melody in the future!

Say cheese!

OK! That's it for now!

We hope y'all have some awesome holidays :>!