Hello again! We are here the week before Soft Opening, making a sprint to implement our changes from Playtest Day and complete as much of the build as possible before next week. Unfortunately, this post is a bit late because this week (week 12) two of us got sick (including myself, hence the late post).
However, that didn’t happen until after Week 11, so let’s go over that instead!
First off, we reworked the way you select your current activity. The old way required you to hold B and turn the crank, which we did because of an interaction with the fishing system. The new system works like this:
1: Hold down the B-button
2: Press left or right on the d-pad to cycle actions.
…and yep, that’s about it.
We’ve also reworked fishing and digging for this system. Now, holding the b-button automatically starts the activity, but pressing the d-pad cancels it.
Since both activities use the crank, this essentially automatically differentiates between a player trying to switch tools or start an activity, which is what the original “entering a state” system was meant to do.
Obviously we still need to test this system more, but it already feels smoother to us, since it allows you to effortlessly go to a location and start your activity without thinking about it, and without preventing you from switching tools.
Also, we’ve moved on from the circle in the bottom left corner. We now have this:
It’s a much fancier circle. You’ll be seeing that in the bottom left corner from now on.
We also have a couple new portraits: Two for the Beaver, who will no longer be represented by the Creaking Wheel, and one for our bartender, the Stoat!
We’ve also got an animation for our menu, which is a journal:
and our fountain has water!
Speaking of the fountain, we’ve been working on the layout for the village. We had started doing this directly in Tiled, but quickly found out that since the Village has so many different props in it, and Tiled doesn’t support moving things around as well as Aesprite, we should lay it out in Aesprite first. So here is that layout:
And in doing this, we realized that we had forgotten about an important element of our town: Shops! So here those are, with a couple other assets as well:
We’ve also done something that we probably should have done a while ago: Putting our dialogue into Twine, so we can test multiple paths!
Now, I have yet another collection of GIFs showing various new features we have implemented. Here they are, with accompanying explanations:
First off, we can now show dynamically sized and positioned text boxes, for use inside fullscreen activities. In this example, it’s the combat tutorial, and in the image below, it’s the alchemy tutorial.
Next up, as one of the things we found in Playtesting was that players had no way to know if completing an activity had actually done anything, we fast-tracked one of our planned features: A toast popup that tells you what you got when you get it!
Also we’ve got the beginnings of our UI for playing the hurdy gurdy:
Anyways, that’s all for this week as we prepare our build for softs next week. We plan to have the game completed up until you get to the outskirts of the village, so we’ll see if we get there. Stay tuned!