General May Update

I'm separating this out from the code'n'stuff posts because those got LONG, and this is also LONG. Nothing bad happened or anything, I just need to cover a few months worth of meandering work here that did eventually lead to cool stuff. So, let's begin!

First of all, please join us on Steam on the June 9th for the Summer Games Festival (that we can talk about now, yay)! There will be a new demo up for the week, and everyone can try it. We'll also be doing a dev stream on the 9th at 4pm PDT, and a Q&A on our Discord on the 10th at 4pm PDT, so stop on by if those things interest you!

Anywho, hi! It's been a few months. So I played Animal Crossing, of course. Did some work on our mission system (this will come up a lot, it was a Lot). Played more Animal Crossing, and more, and more and ok you get the idea. Oh and I got into sourdough because your options are sourdough or podcast in this pandemic, and I like to bake, so hey. Also went down memory lane, and remembered how far the game had come (in case you hadn't seen the early shots - a LONG way, check out that whole thread it's fun). Because of the mission system, I got into custom Unity tooling, and my takeaway is twofold:

• Custom property drawers are really cool.
• ... but probably just get Odin Inspector for the really complex stuff, because WOW it gets dense.
• Consider turning off Odin's persistence. If Odin breaks, that can mean a ton of your data silently disappears. It should be 100% fine running in Inspector-only mode, though.

Anyways, there was also a lot of UI work during this. Trying to pull the game up to looking polished, since if you don't do UI polish work at the start, you convince yourself to cut it for time at the end, and then butts UI is what ships. Also did some bird model work on another of the different body types, and my shiny new junior artist started committing art to the game! Then more UI concepting work, mission offer screens, accessibility options for dialog, and then,

what's this? Collecting letters? Huh, wonder where that's useful. Who knows! Moving on,

Corn nibblies are in the game now too (as collectibles mostly), the letters started looking cooler, the birds found the new hat AND the corn nibblies, and then look at that. Dialog in-game, with a nice UI! This is the full-on mission system, it works, and it's cool. That's story mode, baby.

Then it was back to MORE mission accepting UI, actual NPCs for said missions, and all that UI work culminated in this really pretty bindings display window that I'll throw away the second the Game Festival is over. Heh. Oh well, I needed those glyphs and that popup window elsewhere anyways!

Oh and I finally put all the merch on our main game page! So you can go merch it up if you want. Like there's t-shirts and towels and everything now.

Oh and I fixed a bug that means falls from grinds are a lot more appropriately brutal now, and you can also see another piece of art that the new jr artist made in there. The necklace! Yay!

I also fixed the camera FOV to be wider. Again. Sigh. Then I did a lot of work to build stuff around EasySave, and now I've got this faboo persistence system for saving and loading option settings and whatever else that'll work on any console, and won't hammer the disk when reading (which is important on Certain Consoles). EasySave itself doesn't support consoles, but the folks porting our game to consoles (Plastic Fern, not sure I told y'all about them? They've worked on some BIG games) found info on how to update it to support consoles, so it's seemingly a great choice for that anyways.

aaaand with THAT, we're caught up to today. Can you see why I held off? That last few months of work didn't quite congeal into anything worth showing until the end, so it seemed silly to do one of these until it was to - that. A story needs some kind of satisfying conclusion.

Anyways, now we're on to the Steam Summer Festival game demo thing, and then I'll spend a month just locking down player controls and physics. We're about to leap into production phase, and before that, everything how about the player moves need to be permanent. It's kinda like how you have to know exactly how high Mario can jump before you can make the rest of the game. We're relatively happy with most of it, but now we have to finish polishing and lock it down.

So maybe I'll talk about THAT next month. Until then, toodles!