Last night I got in bed at about half 11 and then immediately had the realisation that I hadn’t gone on a run, it would have ended my 2023 streak so I got out of bed and managed a very tired 1k run. Today I’m happy to say, I’ve ran every day for 90 days and I’ve managed a total distance of 353km so far!!
I missed last weeks post as I kept pushing it off an extra day to try and get more done. I used to do this a lot at university where I’d not want to show work because I hadn’t made enough progress since the last time a tutor had seen it, but then as that elapsed time grew, the amount I needed to justify it grew. I’m striving to feel okay posting with less progress this year; sharing is fun and it doesn’t need to be justified so much!
There is a lot of fun things to cover in this post though! Mostly fun visuals, as you can see from the above image. Thanks to Emily we have an awesome first version of the Ferryman art in the game, not implemented yet cause that’s on me.
I have taken a break from code / design to do some material look dev, we now have a simple first pass of the character shader and whilst it’s early it has sold us both on the games visual vibe. We’ve gone back and forth on a few things, but seeing the creatures like this has us really confident in our little animal community sim game.
Again, it’s still early days, creatures have a lot of different states and we’ll have to figure out how they look in all of those states, but I know we’re gonna make a really adorable game now; hopefully it will also be extremely fun haha.
On the systems side I did get a bunch of menus and overall game manager stuff started, we have our basic versions of a status menu as well as a codex to see info on everything you’ve found.
I have a very basic tutorial set up as well, for the demo it will use the cursed pop-up style that Viva Pinata had, they can get really annoying and people are prone to skipping them but we’ll try to solve that for the full game.
Creature Flow
The biggest change over the last few weeks was how creatures work. Before they just popped up on the island every now and then but that was very unintuitive for the player so now there is an entirely new step to a creature’s journey, the steps are: Discovery, Appearance, Visiting, Resident and Ascent. To make it easy to understand how you’ll be interacting with creatures in this game I’ll break each one down.
Discovery
This occurs when you pass species-specific requirements and whilst there will be a way to get hints for them through rumours and messages in bottles, for the most part those requirements will be hidden.
There will be a cool intro animation for each species and once this occurs, that species may end up appearing near your island!
Appearance
This is the new step we’ve added, rather than just popping up on your island as a visitor they will first show up on your shore, in the river of the damned. They will still be suspicious on your intent but now you will be able to find out what they need to become a visitor.
Visiting
Once they’re happy enough with your island they will hop out of the water and begin exploring, this is great because whilst just appearing they might leave if you don’t impress them, now they’re finally on the island they’ll stick around for a while to wait for you to satisfy their resident requirements.
Resident
You did it! The creature regards your island as it’s home, you learn it’s name (probably Flimflam or Purrgoblim) and all of it’s unfinished business. Now you can try to help the creature move on, so they can ascend.
Ascent
At this point, they’re happy and they don’t feel stuck in limbo anymore! This doesn’t mean they will immediately disappear though, they like your island and don’t mind sticking around.
At some point the Ferryman will make their routine trip past your island and check in, if any creatures are ready to move on they will be allowed safe voyage on the boat, it’s entirely optional but it gets you souls which is valuable currency for upgrading tools and unlocking cool things. It can be sad to let go of a creature though, especially if they‘re this adorable.
I hope that makes the gameplay a little bit clearer, it’s feeling a lot clearer for us now and we can’t wait to make more of the game.
What I did last week
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Pause Menu, both the Island Status and the Codex
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Refactored a bunch of UI and Player Input
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Added a pause state that blurs non-UI
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Added tutorial pop-ups
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Started an early character shader
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Emily finished up a first pass on the Ferryman
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We both completed the pokedex!
What I plan to do next week
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Implement the entire Creature Flow
- Discovery, Appearance, Visiting, Resident and Ascent
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Getting Buildables to save & load
I’m super excited for the next month as I’ve got a bit of time booked off to work exclusively on the game; gonna stop making false deadlines for myself soon but I’m hoping to reach first playable by the end of my break… hopefully.
Goodbye for now!