This week in the Forest! #5

YO FOLKS :>

New week AND new month! So first I'd like to extend a huge THANK YOU to all the new folks who've joined, and all the old folks stickin' around! Y'all the best =)

Onto this week's stuff! First up is code-side!

From Vixel:

"11/30 weekly report!

I upgraded our quests and triggering systems! This required a complete rewrite of many scripts! (I changed just over 8000 lines of code, and about 80% is debugged so far.) This gives us a TON of new flexibility in defining conversations, rules and triggers. A lot of configuration that used to take several longer steps can now be done instantly by drag and drop. :O There are other quality of life improvements too that will make development faster.

Here's some of the stuff this system can do:

- Subquests! A critter is busy with a quest. But something interrupts them and they launch into a whole new quest. They forget about the old quest until the new one is finished, and return to the original quest afterward.

- Location-based content! When a critter travels to a different part of the world, they can now have quests, conversations and gossips that only pertain to THAT part of the world. (eg we can give Maverick a gossip about The Musky Mustelid that's only available while he's standing outside on the riverbank.)

- Some big event can happen and interrupt ALL critters from their quests at once. They can all assume an entirely new storyline, with brand new quests and conversations, until some later event brings them back to their original concerns.

- Any conversation can be a gateway for any other conversation. I can make a dependency like 'examine Scarlett's garden' > 'unlock new Scarlett gossip' > 'unlock new quest by playing gossip' by dragging and dropping a few objects in the Unity editor.

- Conversations can lock/unlock critters from spawning. This makes it easy to write a quest where a critter is away on vacation and won't respawn anywhere for some period of time.

- Inventory items can enable/disable conversations. (Useful for adding things like easter egg gossips if you're carrying a special item.)

"

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Super stoked about all that! I don't want to spoil what we have planned, but we definitely want to shake up the flow of things as the player progresses! Act 2 is the start of a new feature that is yet to be implemented to start pushing us in that direction~ These rewrites now give us that flexibilty to implement that next feature! 

I don't want to over-promise anything, so don't expect anything too crazy, but it is important to our "flow" and "intensity" of the campaign's arch as it unravels! I'll talk more about that once we have that system and content in place :> I can't wait to talk about the game dev concepts behind this whole thing! It's always a struggle between keeping content to be a nice surprise, versus spilling the beans and sharing it as fun behind the scenes... It'll make for a great youtube or something in the future!

NEXT Let's talk art!

My side's actually been a bit slow because i've been doing a lot of animation clean up. I don't wanna drop any loops in here, but I will drop a frame :>

PUUUUUSH!

We've got 3 loops and a major transition done for the bunny 3-way scene! Still need at least one last loop, ideally a second one (before penetration) And definitely have 1 major transition left to do. Some minor transitions, and if I do that "second loop" we'd need another big transition there too...

All in all, still probably a good 30-40 hours left of work on this animation xD Most of the movement's all blocked out, but clean up blows lmao. Not to mention lil' additional things like blinks/cum polish etc.

It's coming along though :> I'd say more than half way at this point! Since a lot of the larger unique key frames are done, that helps the process when re-using areas to keep pixels consistent.

Also been roughing out more of Finley and Rascals loop!

Last week I showed a few of the sketches I didn't go with, but I'll show what I landed on this week!

Looks like a comfty ride ;) - And way more compositionally sound! 👌

We'll have this sketch loop in the build coming up this month! Speaking of the build, we are still about a week out. We don't want another mid-month build, and wanna start rolling it back to early month. BUT since our last release, we've only had 2 weeks to do stuff, and most was back end lol. So giving us some extra time!

LASTLY

I've gone ahead and discontinued the 15$ tier, and will have the New 10$ Tier updated here shortly! 

This month we will be doing another Story Poll for all patreons! Then the 10$ tier folks will help us decide on content for "that new feature" I was talking about earlier!

So keep an eye out for those =)

OK THAT'S IT!

We'll see ya guys next time!