First update of 2024! Lots of artwork completed! Bees!
about 1 month ago – Tue, Mar 05, 2024 at 09:06:55 AM

Hey everyone! 

It's been a couple of months since the end of year update so I wanted to fill everyone in on the progress. I've been incredibly busy with development of Cloudscape, trying to get it ready for release this year!

Character Portraits

For the past two months I've almost solely been creating art for the game. I completed 13 more Character Portraits for Wimnim Island, which completes all character portraits for the villagers there. This includes all of their expressions, along with blinking and talking animations.

Here are a few of the character portraits!

Crops

I also created 54 complete sprite sheets for crops, 21 sprite sheets for flowers and 20 sprite sheets for herbs and spices. Each one of these sprite sheets required around 6 sprites on average, for a total of 475 sprites! The only remaining crop sprites left to make at this point are the various fruit and nut trees.

Here are a few examples of completed crop and flower sprite sheets:

Cooking

With all these crops to farm, I moved on to working on the Cooking feature of the game. This includes adding over 57 cooking dishes along with their item icons, and also adding the Cutting Board, Cask, Cooking Pot, Oven, Mixing Station and Frying Pan as various tools you can use to craft all sorts of recipes! These are now all fully operational in the game, however I do plan to get around to making mini-games for several of these tools, to make cooking a lot more interesting. :)

Each dish has a recipe you can learn, and requires different ingredients and tools to make. Dishes can be sold or may provide temporary buffs (or debuffs) and usually provide energy when consumed.

Here are some of the Kitchen Tools and Dishes I've been working on:

Bug Catching

After that, I shifted focus to working on the Bug Catching features, which had me adding in all of the artwork for the 5 Bug Net upgrades, along with coding their functionality.

I've also added around a dozen new Insects to the game! Along with this, I focused on improving insect behaviors and how to go about catching insects. I've added a new feature to the Net tool. This requires you to hold down the tool button to allow you to sneak slowly toward insects without causing them to flee. Once you're within range, you can release the button to swing your net and catch the insect!

All insects now flee if you approach them too quickly, or if you miss catching them when you swing your net.

With all of this added, I also added in the Skill Goal Rewards for the Bug Catching Skill. This means you have a lot of different goals to hit in order to unlock improvements to your Bug Catching skills. You can improve how fast you move while using the net, how fast you swing, and even increasing the chance to catch an additional bug or increase the likelihood of rare bugs appearing!

Here's a clip of various Insects inhabiting the world and attempting to catch them with the Net:

Honey and Bees

Finally, my most recent addition to the game is Honey. This of course, comes from Bees. In order to produce Honey, you will first need to place down a Wooden Beehive. Then you must catch a Honeybee. Once you've obtained the recipe for making Honeycomb, you can interact with the Beehive to begin the Honeycomb making process. This requires one Honeybee and some time. Once enough time has passed, you can collect the Honeycomb. From there, you can use a Mixing Station to turn that Honeycomb into sweet, sweet Honey!

Honey can be used in a variety of dishes, sold as is, or you can simply drink it up if you so choose!

Here's a video of catching a Bee, then using a Beehive and waiting for it to create a Honeycomb:

What's Next

Once I've finished a few more insects, I'll be taking a break from that to focus entirely on Limbo! This is the afterlife in Cloudscape, and you'll be able to visit here to participate in a variety of minigames to earn Spirit Tokens which will let you buy all sorts of things from the unique shop!

I'll then be shifting my focus over to adding more things to Farming, Woodcutting, Mining and Excavating. This likely includes finishing up all of the Fruit Trees, adding in the remaining Trees you can chop to gather special resources, adding more details to the Mines and also rounding out the Excavating skill with some more treasures to uncover!

That's all for this update, see you in a month or two!

~ Koni

Happy New Year and 2023 Wrap Up!
4 months ago – Wed, Jan 03, 2024 at 01:42:36 PM

Hello everyone! I hope everyone had a happy holiday season and a happy new year. I wanted to get one last update out for 2023 to cover what I've been doing with Cloudscape and also what I'm going to be working on into the new year. However this update got pushed into January due to me having the flu for the past week which has had me sleeping or feeling miserable most of the time. I'm happy to say that I'm finally feeling better, so I'm back to fully working on the game again and wanted to post this update.

The last year has had ups and downs for sure. Early in the year I had a critical hard drive failure which could not be recovered after sending it to 3 different repair places. I've since redone the missing work but it was not a fun time and definitely a setback. The planned release of the game in Summer 2023 was very ambitious, and in hindsight I should have definitely given myself more time for development. It's very hard to figure out every little thing that the game is going to need, let alone estimating how long everything is going to take.

With that said, I'm still working hard on the game almost every single day, and I'm excited to share what new developments have happened since the previous update.

Wimnim Villager Sprite Sheets Completed

I've finished all of the base sprite sheets for every villager on Wimnim Island. This is a total of 18 villagers with idle, sleep, sitting and walk cycles for all 4 directions. Below you'll see a few of these finished characters. Remember that each one is unique and hand-crafted, so it's quite a lot of work!

Romantic Bouquet and Dating

The Romantic Bouquet item is finally added. Players can purchase this item to gift to eligible villagers in order to begin the process of romancing them. Unlike in most games that involve dating, Cloudscape offers two different paths when it comes to building relationships with characters. You can choose to only be friends with a villager, or to take things further by unlocking romance with them. This will let you really bond with characters without them necessarily falling in love with you if you don't want them to.

Once you gift a Romantic Bouquet to an eligible villager you will be able to increase their Romance hearts which will unlock special romantic cutscenes and dialogue, along with eventually being able to marry that villager.

Added All Growable Crops

A time consuming portion of the development is creating all of the crops in Cloudscape. The game will have 53 total crops, 20 different fruit trees, 22 different flowers, 19 herbs/spices and at least 4 different mushrooms for a total of 118 things to grow!

Now I will admit, the crops aren't 100% finished. I still need to create a lot of sprite sheets for the crop growth stages. This will also take a lot of time. However, I've at the very least created a massive spreadsheet which contains all of the growth information for each crop. For example, how many days it takes to grow, the number of growth stages each crop has, the cost of the seeds, the cost of the crop, growing seasons and more. All crops are *in* the game and can be grown, however many of them still have placeholder artwork for their sprites. All crop, seeds, seed bags and sapling icons now exist.

With the addition of all of these crops, I also needed to implement functionality for Fruit Trees. These behave a bit differently from normal crops, as these function much like normal trees, which means they can be cut down. You can shake them to harvest the fruit, which will drop to the ground. They also have long growth cycles. 

Once the sprite sheets for all crops are finished, then all growable crops will be 100% complete!

I've also finished implementing the Magnifying Glass tool. This tool allows you to view each crop/soil tile and get a quick glance at crop growth stage, soil quality, and whether the soil has fertilizer or conditioner applied to it. You can even see if the soil is wet and if the crop is protected by a Scarecrow! This also means I've added Fertilizer, Soil Conditioner and Compost into the game as well. All of this works and allows you more flexibility and strategy when growing all of the various crops. 

Pigs and Piglets

The latest addition for your ranch are Pigs and Piglets! These are fully finished and implemented, however I do plan to have various styles/colors added in later. You can purchase Piglets at Rin Ranch on Wimnim Island. From there, you will designate a Barn for them to live in. You will give them food and water and be able to pet them daily. Pigs will dig up various things from the ground each day. These may be things like Truffles, or possibly even minerals or artifacts. 

Map Improvements + Villager Profiles

Maps offer a big quality of life feature for games of this scale. It can be difficult learning how to navigate multiple islands, and keeping track of dozens of villagers, animals, and key locations. The map has been upgraded to include being able to select specific villagers to jump right to their profiles. You will also be able to track a specific villager if you so desire. Tracking a villager will display an arrow on screen pointing toward the villager's location. While this isn't a perfect waypoint system, it will give you a general idea of where the villager is located in real time. 

The villager profiles include lots of useful information, such as your Friendship/Romance status with the villager, the villager's birthday, home island and favorite season, fragrance and color. There is also a list of discovered loved, liked, disliked and hated items for each villager. As you learn more information about a villager, this profile screen will fill out with that information. You should be able to organically discover a villager's likes and dislikes, allowing you to give them gifts they like, and wear their favorite fragrance for additional affection boost.

Currently Working On

I'm currently adding a lot of dialogue for Wimnim Island characters, and setting up all of their Friendship and Romance cutscenes. I also jumped over to working on adding in all remaining Skill Goals/Rewards, which have since been added but don't all have functionality at this point. The added Goals/Rewards include Cooking, Crafting, Fighting, Socializing, Ranching and Farming. I've also added 105 total Artifacts that you can obtain through Excavating, which I'll cover more in depth in a later update.

My main plan right now is to focus on each island in order of appearance and try to finish them one by one. This means right now I'm focused on Wimnim Island. Once I've finished (or mostly finished) development for that, I'll move over to Gravelston Island, and then finally Stratus Island. Once all three islands are finished, I will just need to do a bit of development work on various other unfinished things and the game will be very close to completion!

Rounding off and a Happy New Year!

With all that said, I fully expect to finish and release Cloudscape in 2024. That's my number one priority and goal right now. I want to bring everyone the best possible version of the game that I can, and I appreciate everyone being understanding about the delays. Thanks and have a happy new year!

 - Koni

October Update! Villagers, Islands and Core Quest Line
6 months ago – Tue, Oct 31, 2023 at 11:36:42 AM

Hello everyone! 

I'm back with another update on Cloudscape's development! Lots of exciting things to cover in this update… So here's a quick breakdown of what's been going on.

• All planned villagers now exist in the game
• Implemented another player transportation upgrade
• Added Fertilizer, Compost, Soil Conditioner and the Magnifying Glass
• More progress on the 3 inhabited islands
• Added NPC heart events system for triggering cutscenes with villagers
• Improved map functionality to allow for selecting villagers on the map to view their profiles
• Added villager profiles

The list likely looks smaller than last update, however some of these took a lot of time, such as adding in all planned villagers and all of the growable crops.  I've seen a few comments from people who seem disappointed with some smaller updates I've shown, but please be aware that what I show and what I've completed are two different things. There is a lot of development behind the scenes that... don't really look that interesting, because a lot of it involves lines of code, drawing characters and animating them frame-by-frame, or maybe even there's things I simply don't want to spoil or reveal yet.

I understand the game is behind schedule for release, and I know that sucks a lot. I'm the only developer working on this game, and it's not easy to create a game of this scale alone. Hiring a team of people to help me with it would result in big disruption from needing new workflows split across multiple people, and introduce larger overheads from having to manage a team - so ironically, even if I wanted to bring in contractors/a team to work on this, the overall pacing would likely remain the same. So development has gone slower than expected, but all I can do is promise that progress *is* being made almost every single day, and that I spent the vast majority of my time on this every day. With all that said, lets get on to the actual update!

Villager Updates

I have gone through and created all planned villagers for the game. This includes every villager for each major island. They now have names, faces and personalities... in other words, they're all unique, with their own specific dialogues, routine, behavior, etc! There is still quite a lot of work to do writing up all of their dialogue, finishing their sprite sheets, and more. However it's a great first step to have them all existing in the world, as it allows me to start building the world around them more, and further implementing them and all of their relationships.

There are 53 total villagers in Cloudscape, so you can imagine it's taking me quite some time to develop and design each and every one of them. It's not a simple task of just cutting-and-pasting or cloning them because Cloudscape won't have an army of identical NPCs - each one is a unique character.

These villagers do not include the Kickstarter Backer Reward villagers which I still need to create. I will be reaching out to those designer backers over time to work with them and add their villagers into the game as well.

Heart Event System

One problem I needed to solve was how you go about triggering heart and friendship events with villagers. Since Cloudscape is quite an open world experience, it didn't make sense to hide event triggers around the world, causing you as the player to be confused as to where and when these events take place. The way this system works is that when you reach a certain friendship or romance level with a villager, you unlock a new Heart Event with them. Once you unlock a Heart Event, you will immediately be notified. The Heart Event icon will appear on the world map, allowing you to easily locate where it is.

Finally, when you reach the location of the Heart Event, you will see a visible Heart floating in the environment. This is a Heart Event Trigger. Simply walking up and touching these hearts will trigger the Heart Event Cutscene. From there, you will get to experience a fun cutscene with that specific villager. So no worries about ever missing one of these events, as they will always be clearly visible!

Final Player Transportation Upgrade

I've also added the final upgrade for the player's transportation. I previously added the upgrade from Raft to Sailboat. This final upgrade will allow the player to reach all of the inhabited islands. I don't want to spoil too much as this involves the end-game stages of Cloudscape, so I won't show any images of it for now.

Core Story Questline Implementation

This was actually a load of work to do. You will reach a point in the game where you receive a very large quest to complete. This quest will take quite a bit of time, and require you to achieve many different things. I'm happy to say that all of the functionality for these tasks now exists in the game. In fact, with the help of a few debug generated items, you can finally "beat" the game and reach the Credits screen! This was a major milestone to hit, as it means the core goal of the game now exists in its entirety.

Reaching the Credits screen is a way to "complete" the game in the conventional sense, however the game won't just end once the credits roll. As an open world game, you will be able to continue playing where you left off, and also unlock more features within the game. There will also still be many goals you can complete, along with any personal goals you've given yourself along the way.

Inhabited Island Progress

More work has been done to all 3 inhabited islands. I've added more detail and completed more building artwork for Wimnim Island. I also added quite a bit of detail and decoration to Gravelston. Stratus is in early placeholder status, with general building layout and villagers populating the island. The coming months will see me focusing heavily on filling out these islands with more stuff, and of course developing all of the villagers even more.

Furniture/Wall Object Interactions

I've also added functionality for placing and interacting with objects on walls. This was a bit tricky, since it's possible to place an interactable object on a wall, and then place an object on the floor in front of it, which would mean you don't have access to get close enough to the wall object to interact with it. To solve this problem, I created a solution where you simply hold down the action button for a moment, and it will trigger a special object selection mode, allowing you to cycle through various out of reach wall objects to interact with them remotely.

This felt like the best solution to this issue. I know I could have allowed the player to simply click on an object to interact with it, but this creates a dependency on mouse control, which I want to avoid due to the game being cross-platform. I'd really like to avoid needing to use an on-screen cursor when playing with a controller, while also not downgrading the PC control experience. I think this is about as good of a compromise as I can make in this circumstance.

Other Things

As always, a lot of time is always set aside for bug fixes, optimization and improving of existing systems. I have fixed various issues with waypoints, cutscenes and more. I've added more functionality to the level chunk loading system, which will now allow for large objects to properly display. Before when a large object existed across multiple chunks, it would sometimes pop on out of nowhere, due to the chunk that it existed in being too far away to load. Now chunks have a special flag to indicate that they have large objects in them, which means these chunks will load in even further away, to ensure those large objects are always visible.

Wrapping Up

I will be honest and admit that progress has slowed down a bit in the past couple of months. This is simply due to the aspect of the game's development taking longer than planned, meaning I had to take the time and do an element of re-budgeting for the game in order to allow for continued full time development. So do not fret: I have been successful in sourcing the supplemental funding needed, and I'm happy to say that I've largely worked out that issue now. The matter of having rent and living sorted so I can concentrate fully on the game won't be an issue for the time being. I won't be disappearing on you and as mentioned earlier, I work on this full time, every single day, as a one man band. (ironically, aside from the music composition which is almost completely finished!) Some might ask why the game isn't finished yet, and all I can say is that estimating the completion of such a large project is never easy. I'm a solo developer and also just a normal person so sometimes life gets in the way, money issues get in the way, burnout gets in the way, ideas need iterating or sometimes don't work out and need re-doing, and sometimes development can just be really stressful, especially when behind.

With that said, I'm not going to sit here making excuses and I know people are looking forward to playing the game as soon as possible. All I can do is put my head down and work hard and the game's final release will come in time.

Over the next two months I'll be crunching to get all inhabited islands near completion. This will be a monumental task, so I can't promise that I'll be very active with updates until January. I will try my best to at least post some smaller updates to social media and to the discord server.

Take care, and have a good holiday season!

-Koni

Mid-August Update! Sailboat, Gravelston Island, Tool Upgrades and more!
8 months ago – Mon, Aug 14, 2023 at 09:05:55 AM

Hey everyone! It's been about a month since the last update. I'm trying to be better about posting monthly updates so here's the next one! Here's a quick breakdown of what I've worked on for the last month:

• Added prototype/placeholder islands for Gravelston and Stratus
• Implemented Seasonal island functionality
• Worked on various villagers for Gravelston
• Worked on various art, objects and level design for Gravelston
• Implemented seasons into the Calendar along with some villager birthdays
• Began work on the first holiday event and implemented all holiday music
• Added the first player transportation upgrade: the Sailboat!
• Lots of improvements to auto item-collect feature
• Upgraded Tool Area of Effect Functionality
• Tons of bug fixes, balance changes, etc

Gravelston and Stratus Islands

These two islands are the remaining major islands inhabited by villagers in Cloudscape. The layouts and general level design planning for these islands are now complete. I've set up the basic world data and have generated both islands so now they actually exist in the game. I've also worked on the method of unlocking and traveling to Gravelston. The coming months will have me working more on all 3 inhabited islands to add more content to each of them.

The above image shows the early concept layout (on the left) which I simply drew up in Photoshop to get a general idea for how the island will be shaped, the placement of buildings and so on.

The island on the right of the image is the actual in-game island (map view) which I've generated and began working on. It doesn't represent a perfect zoom out of the island as it doesn't show any of the pipes or detailing that have been added, and also currently shows buildings as empty squares. This is however the first step in getting the island playable, and taking it from concept to an actual thing you can walk around in and explore.

Seasonal Islands

Each time you unlock a major inhabited island, you also unlock a smaller seasonal island. These islands are uninhabited and the player can travel to them to do whatever they'd like there. This includes foraging for seasonal items, farming seasonal items, catching seasonal bugs and fish, and much more. These islands are very similar to the player's own island, where you can build structures and chop down trees and mine rocks. This provides the player with more necessary resources, and also lets the player grow seasonal crops "year round".

The player's island experiences all 4 seasons, so it isn't possible to grow spring crops in the winter, as expected. But the player can travel to the Spring Island to grow spring crops, even if it's currently winter on their own island. This *sort of* acts like a "greenhouse" in other farming games, however there are some major differences. Namely, each island can only grow their specific seasonal crops, and the islands have much more things to do than simply growing crops. It also means if you are in dire need of a specific seasonal fish, you don't have to wait several seasons to fish for it, you can simply travel to the seasonal island and fish for it right away.

I've set up the islands so they generate in the most basic form, however I will still need to go in for each island and modify the world data later on to allow these islands to offer more of their seasonal diversity.

Gravelston Villagers, Art, Level Design and More!

I spent quite a bit of time working on getting Gravelston up and running. Once the islands were generated, I wanted to focus on starting to flesh them out with the villagers, buildings, levels, etc. So I created half a dozen of the characters that will live on Gravelston. Here are just two of them as to not spoil too much just yet!

Gravelston is a sort of industrial mining town, with a slightly steampunk/modern aesthetic. This means the island is quite rocky and multi-tiered. So I've been working on setting up the basic overall shape of the island and the layout of where all the buildings and such will be located. The island also runs on steam power, which is generated from a hot spring at the top of the mountain. There will be large pipes running all across the island to transport the steam where its needed.

Gravelston will unlock a lot of new features in the game, including upgrading tools, deeper mining exploration, advanced cooking and more. Lots of exciting things to come!

Holidays and Calendar Update

There are currently 9 planned holiday events for Cloudscape, which take place across various islands. I've locked down the dates for all of these events, and have added them into the Calendar, along with birthdays for all of Wimnim Island's villagers.

During holidays, while visiting islands hosting the event, the music will change and the environment/scenery will update to reflect the holiday taking place that day. I've already implemented all of the holiday music into the game, and have set up the basic functionality for having holiday décor be added around the islands. The next step will be to add in the dialogue for the various villagers that they will speak during a holiday event, along with adding the actual mini-games or special features for each holiday. The goal is to make these days really special so players look forward to each holiday. I also plan to add some randomness to each holiday event which will allow the same holiday event to be a bit different each year!

For example, the villagers participating in mini-games may change from year to year, and the prizes may also change. Villager dialogue will also cycle through so you will never see the same dialogue from a villager at a holiday event in consecutive years. You will also obtain trophies from certain mini-game events which you can display on your own island.

Sailboat

The Sailboat is the first upgrade to the player's Raft. Each upgrade allows the player to travel further, meaning they can unlock new islands to visit. So a majory priority for players should be to always work on upgrading your method of transportation! I've recently completed the first upgrade, which is turning the player's Raft into a Sailboat. The upgrade will require materials that are a bit harder to obtain, so it will take a bit of time and planning to gather these materials.

Once you've gathered the needed materials, you can speak with Bagaroot in Wimnim to upgrade your Raft. From there, you will immediately unlock new locations to travel to on your map!

Item Auto-Collect

I've worked to improve this feature quite a bit. It's now just more intelligent about magnetizing and picking up items for the player. One issue was when the player would drop an item on to the ground, the Auto-Collect feature would simply pick it right back up again. I've since added a delay so that dropped items will wait a while before being attracted to the player again.

There was also an interesting problem to solve when it came to destroyed monsters dropping items in out of reach places. Particularly the Skreaks as they can fly over terrain. When the player would deal the fatal blow to a Skreak, it would get knocked backward, sometimes over an unreachable area. It would then drop monster loot, such as the Skreak Wing. However, it was entirely out of reach of the player, even with the Auto-Collect as it would go outside of the collection radius. The fix was to add item behavior which would check if the item was dropped on to unreachable terrain, and simply "slide" the item toward the player until it was within the player's reach. So no more worrying about items being stuck on walls!

(pardon the dark video, you can illuminate caves with various lighting options!)

Upgraded Tools Functionality

As of today I just finished up several upgraded tools functionality, which is pretty much a staple in farming games at this point. The Hoe, Water Can and Seed Bags all now have the ability to use a wider area of affect range by holding down the tool button. Most tools have around 6 upgrade levels. Each level provides more durability for the tool along with a wider area of effect available.

As you can see in this example, holding down the Gold Hoe will cycle through various AoE options up until it's maximum AoE, which is a 3x3 tile block. Releasing the button will till all possible tiles.

The same goes for various Water Cans. This system smartly checks each space in a specific order, to ensure that the player has enough energy/water/etc and also that the space is valid. What this basically means is that the area of effect works just as if you were to individually use the tool at each space.

One interesting change is that Seed Bags also have this same functionality. In most farming games, a Seed Bag simply sprinkles 9 seeds around the player and it's done. If you accidentally sprinkled a seed on an unavailable tile, it just didn't care and would waste your seed. In Cloudscape, the Seed Bag works like other AoE tools, so that means each seed spot is checked and validated before placing the seed. No more wasted seeds! Each Seed Bag holds 9 seeds, so you can still use an entire bag to plant 9 seeds at once, if you so choose. You can also plant one seed at a time using the Seed Bag.

I plan to improve the appearance and effects for the AoE tool casts, but for now the functionality is there.

Bug Fixes, Improvements, Etc

Every month of work also introduces a lot of bugs. This is sort of unavoidable with how many different systems are interacting at once, and all of the possible variables I simply can't account for. Needless to say, I'm not waiting until the game releases before fixing the bugs. I like to tackle them right away, so the game just works better overall.

This month saw a lot of fixes to shopping and obtaining discounted shop items. I fixed some issues with player reviving, task completion, the task list, cutscene issues, overworld map selecting, the town board system and more.

I've also done more tweaking to the balance of the early game. These changes reflect the addition of gathering some resources through debris, which made chopping down trees or mining rocks not as effective as gathering resources from debris. These tweaks have made for a quicker paced early game, which was always intended, but until other features were implemented, was not actually the case.

All this is to say that the early game now plays much better and is a much more enjoyable experience overall, so I'm excited for everyone to experience it for the first time. :)

Designer Backer Update

This month I am designating time to begin actually working on various Designer Tier rewards. This means I will be reaching out to some of the Designer Tier backers this month to actually start working on your designs! Now that the game is farther along, I am more confident with how these designs can fit into the game and what is required for completing them. I will most likely be starting on the lower Designer Tier rewards such as the furniture sets and possibly the monster designs. The coming months will have me working more on the villager designs, so look out for that if you backed those tiers! (I've already started reaching out to Furniture Theme backers as of this post)

That's all for this update. I've been working almost every single day on the game and the pace of some areas of development have definitely started picking up! I hope everyone is doing well. Take care

- Koni

MEGA July Update! Wimnim Island and Villager development update! Delay announcement...
10 months ago – Mon, Jul 03, 2023 at 11:02:39 AM

Hey everyone! I'm back after a while to loop everyone in on what I've been up to since the last update. Which is a lot!

Here's a quick list of everything I've been doing:

• Added first floor of cave to Wimnim Island
• Added a variety of flora around Wimnim Island
• Added a Waterfall to Wimnim Island (and the ability to create waterfalls easily elsewhere in the world)
• Added a lot of ground details around Wimnim Island
• Rebuilt the lighting system to better work with Interior/Exterior lighting
• Created the fishing dock to Wimnim Island along with Seid's Bait and Tackle shop
• Created Bagaroot's Builds exterior and re-Added Frut's General Store exterior.
• Expanded Cutscene functionality to include NPCs moving to locations, dialogue during cutscenes, rewards from cutscenes and more
• Added one week's worth of general dialogue for all Wimnim Villagers
• Added basic routines for all Wimnim Villagers
• Added Cows, and made major improvements and fixes to animal behaviors
• Created lots of maker items and new resources to implement later
• Improved map functionality including an overworld map where you unlock new locations
• Added an item pick up list to the HUD
• Completely overhauled the introductory portion of the game
• Major Optimization to level loading

I want to take a moment to apologize for the lack of updates/posts/etc from me the past couple of months. Things have been pretty hectic, I've been working on the game a lot. However, there was a hard drive failure which resulted in several weeks of lost work. I've also been restructuring how the beginning of the game works, in order to make the introduction a lot better. With that said, unfortunately this means delays...

Delays

As much as I hate having to do this, the release of the game is going to be delayed until 2024. I know this is typical of Kickstarter game projects, and I really wanted to avoid doing this at all costs... however following this hard drive failure, the amount of work needed to bring this game to the level I want it to be at has unfortunately been put back a bit.

Unfortunately even with experience planning out deadlines for things, disruptions such as this hard drive failure can cause wrinkles that can't be accounted for.  Please know that I'm working incredibly hard on the game. The massive amount of overhead before getting into the content creation portion of development is finally wrapping up, and this means development *should* pick up a lot in the coming months. To be forthright, while we do work with source backups, the drive failure resulted in a loss of multiple WIP systems that now need to be rebuilt. This is, of course, on top of pre-existing content which is to-do or WIP, so realistically this has set me back to point prior to the drive failure. That said, I have taken steps to rectify this going forward.

With all of that said, I still plan to have an early beta test of the game towards the end of 2023. This means for anyone who backed the tiers that provide Early Access to the beta, you will get to play the game in its early state before the end of this year. Please note this is only possible for Steam, but anyone who backed the Early Access Tier or higher will get a temporary key for this, regardless of what platform you chose.

Now, since the game is being delayed slightly, this also means all physical goods are also delayed until the game's release in 2024. It just doesn't make sense to ship the physical goods in the coming months, and then also ship the physical game next year. Not to mention, collectors editions will contain some of the physical goods, so those will have to wait until the game is finished regardless. Also art books sort of need to include... art... which hasn't been finished. The art book won't even be prepared until the game is nearing completion, in order to make it the best it can be.

I hope everyone can understand this inconvenience with the game being delayed. I'm just one guy making this game, and there's a lot of game to make. So I ask that you please be patient so I can bring you something really great. On a positive note, I have done so much with the game in the past few months and I'm excited to share that with you in the very large update below!

Wimnim Island Cave

I've gone ahead and created a first pass placeholder area for the first floor of the cave on Wimnim Island. Here you'll be able to unlock the spelunking ladder area to explore deeper into the mines. The first floor is hand-crafted while floors below will be procedurally generated.

It was fairly easy to link this up to the outside cave entrance on Wimnim Island, and while I did this, I also fixed a sort of annoying issue where if you moved horizontally along the outside cave wall, positioned yourself in front of the cave entrance, and pressed up to go inside, it wouldn't work. This was due to a weird collision trigger issue I created for myself… which I've since fixed, so warping is much more reliable now.

Wimnim Island Flora

I've added quite a bit of vegetation around the island. This is basically like another early pass of adding in vegetation on top of the already existing pass. The plan is still to do yet another pass of new vegetation and then finally I'll go in and tweak and polish things and make various areas around the island more unique. Included in this update are Palm Trees (unfinished sprites), Areca Palms, Cattail Reeds, Dwarf Sugar Palm and Calla Lillies.

   The goal is to make Wimnim a lush tropical island, so the more plant life and variety of plants I can place around the island, the better.

Waterfalls

Wimnim Island has a nice location with a cliffside pond which was in desperate need of a waterfall. Implementing this was fairly straightforward. I just animated a waterfall that is 1 tile space wide and made sure it could repeat horizontally. I then added it as a new object to the game and gave it a custom width property. So now adding waterfalls of various widths is just a single value change.

I also punched it up a bit with some particle effects, including a splash at the base, drops falling down and also some water disturbance at the bottom. Along with this I also needed to add sound to the waterfall. Doing this required I add more functionality to my Sound Manager, which handles all sounds in the game. It's now much easier for me to add looping sounds to objects in the game. Most sounds in Cloudscape also have a falloff based on distance from the sound, so in the clip you can hear how the waterfall gets louder as you get closer to it.

Of course, I also had to add a special secret way to swim in the pond, which you'll have to discover for yourself. :)

Ground Detailing around Wimnim

I've started fleshing out the detailing around the island. It's far from finished but just laying the "groundwork" for more to come. This will be modified and refined as areas get more well established. You can see glimpses of it throughout most of these clips.

Lighting System Overhaul

The lighting that existed in the game up to this point was decent but it did not work for interior setups. It was essentially just a global lighting that illuminated everything… so the outdoor lighting would light up interiors which wasn't really ideal. I spent some time getting this to work, and I'm happy to say it's around 85% complete now. There are a few things I need to finish and adjust, but the overall system is in place and working. Interior spaces now have their own lighting separate from the exterior lighting.

This was particularly tricky since the interiors in Cloudscape appear directly on the screen with the exterior world. They aren't separated into their own screens. I did this intentionally to prevent load times as I'm not really fond of having to completely change scenes just to go in and out of a building.

Wimnim Island Dock

There are actually two docks on the island, one being on the shore, where you enter and exit the island, and the other is inland, resting on a lake. The lake dock is the location of the Bait and Tackle shop, and the residence of Ani Seid.

I created the first pass for the dock, and implemented it into the game. I also set up the Bait and Tackle shop, however it's currently a placeholder exterior but I've already sketched out the design for it. In this shop you'll be able to of course buy bait and tackle, but you'll also be able to check the Record Fish Catches, and have your fish weighed here to try and beat the existing records. You will get rewards for beating Ani's record catches. 

Finally, you can come here daily for new Fish Facts. Ani will tell you a new fact about a random fish which will get saved to your Journal. These facts give you information about each fish including what time of day they are most active, what seasons they are most active, where they can be located (rivers, lakes, oceans) and what type of weather they prefer.

Each fish will have all 4 of these bits of information to discover, and since it's saved in your journal, it will make it easy to determine where and when you can catch a particular fish that you're after.

Bagaroot's Builds and Frut's General

I've been adding the artwork for the various buildings around the island. These 2 are the first buildings you'll most likely encounter when you arrive on the island the first time. These surround the Town Square so I went to work making these first.

The General Store is pretty self-explanatory. You'll be able to buy all sorts of items here, including seeds, tools, clothing and furniture. Bagaroot's Builds is the local carpenter shop. Here you can buy building blueprints and furniture, along with working on special construction projects with Bagaroot.

Cutscenes

I've been expanding the functionality of cutscenes to accommodate more complex scenes. The first step was getting NPCs moving around and performing actions during cutscenes. The next step was getting dialogue working inside of cutscenes. There was only a bit of work to do with this, but it still required some special checks to include dialogue that would continue or end a cutscene once you were finish reading it.

I also implemented receiving items after cutscenes, for example you might talk to a villager in a cutscene and they can give you an item, which you'll receive in your hands after the cutscene ends.

Finally I've added a "skip" feature to cutscenes, which you'll be able to do by holding down a button for a moment in order to basically fast-forward through a cutscene to get to the end, just in case you've already seen it before, or you're just impatient. :)

Character Dialogue and Routines

I went to work writing dialogue for each villager. I wanted to begin by writing some general "small talk" dialogue, so I wrote 7 days worth of dialogue for each character. This dialogue is the most basic of dialogue which may get repeated if there isn't any other dialogue meeting current conditions when chatting. That doesn't meant the dialogue can't be interesting, so I've been making sure to not just write "nice weather" and call it a day.

All of the dialogue for each character will reflect that character's personality, and I'm doing my best to make sure the dialogue is interesting and fun to read.

This is just the tip of the iceberg for character dialogue. The goal is to have over 100 lines of dialogue for each character. With dialogue matching all sorts of conditions in the game world. Such as time of day, day of the week, seasonal dialogue, event dialogue, weather dialogue and of course special dialogue for reaching certain levels of friendship and affection.

   I'm also planning to implement villager "memories" which basically means they will have some short and long term memories which they can utilize to determine what dialogue to use in a given situation. For example, a villager memory might be that you've restored a damaged bridge in the village. If a villager has this memory, they will speak a line of dialogue related to that specific incident. Afterward, that memory will be removed so that dialogue line won't be spoken again.

This is *sort of* similar to how other games handle events and such. However, in most of those games, the event dialogue is just queued up to be spoken the next time you talk to the NPC. This isn't ideal, because for example you might attend an event, which makes it so all NPCs will have their next dialogue be about that event taking place. However, if you don't talk to an NPC for a month or so, it would be odd to talk to them and they are still talking about an event that happened a month ago, like it just happened yesterday.

With these "memories" the villagers will eventually forget about stuff like that, so it will feel more organic and less robotic.

Finally, I've implemented basic routines for each villager. These will be the simplest routines for the villagers to follow when they go about their day. However, I fully intend to add a lot of variety to these routines, as the entire routine is determined by a myriad of factors and conditions, including but not limited to: weather, time of day, time of year, special events and island changes

Cows Go Moo

I've added the cows! Currently there's just the one style of cow which comes in a variety of colors, however there are plans to add at least two more styles of cow. These function about how you'd expect a cow to function in a farming game. You can milk them (no tools required, just hands!) to get bottles of milk. You can nourish them by filling the food and water troughs. They will sleep in their assigned Barns... and of course... you can pet them. :)

Cows have an affection level much like other animals in the game. The quality and size of milk that cows produce is determined by their affection level and also their age. Milk will of course have a lot of uses, such as being turned into cheese or used in an assortment of cooking recipes.

Makers

I've created a handful of the makers that will be in the game. These include a Spinning Wheel, Loom, Seed Extractor and Cheese Press. Spinning Wheels take in raw Cotton, Wool and Silk to produce Cotton Thread, Wool Thread and Silk Thread. This thread can then be used in the Loom to weave into Fabrics. The final stop is the Sewing Station, where you'll be able to create clothing and accessories using a variety of materials.

The Seed Extractor works much like expected. You put crops in, you get seeds out. One interesting thing to note about Seeds: They come in bags but also individually. How this works is that if you have individual Seeds, they simply stack and you can place them one by one on tilled soil to plant them. But Seed Bags come in packs of up to 9 Seeds. You can use a Seed Bag much like other tools, in that you can hold down the tool button to expand the radius of the tool action. So in this case, you can hold down the tool button to toss out 1, 3, 6 or 9 seeds at once. No worries if you try to toss seeds and they can't be placed down, those will just stay in your Seed Bag. Later you'll be able to combine 9 seeds into a Seed Bag for easier storage and use as well.

Finally the Cheese Press is used to press Milk into Cheese. This is a pretty straightforward process of inserting Milk, waiting for the Press to do its magic, and then collecting the Cheese. You will be able to produce different types of Cheese in the Press including Cheddar, Mozzarella, Gouda and more.

Overworld Map

I've also recently added the Overworld Map to the Map screen. This was a much needed feature, as it's the way you can travel between the various islands and also check out the maps for each island anywhere. Each time you visit a new location, the Overworld Map will update to show the location being unlocked. There are 4 major locations to unlock and 4 smaller locations to unlock. The nice this is that each map also shows the locations of every villager, so you'll always know exactly where to find someone!

It's still heavily a work in progress!

Item Pick Up

I quickly added this just the other day. I didn't actually intend to add this, however after playing some time using the auto-collect feature, I realized sometimes it was hard to know what items I picked up, as many items could be collected at once. This little list is pretty standard in these types of games, so now it's also in Cloudscape. This list will only show *fresh* item pickups, such as new Stone or Wood collected, items freshly foraged, etc. It will not show items you simply dropped and picked up from your inventory.

You can see in the clip above that there's now a pick up list at the bottom left corner of the screen. :)

Introduction Overhaul

So an issue that has cropped up during testing is that the early game felt like it was dragging a bit. This was mainly due to me structuring the pace around the content that was available in the game at the time. Now that I've been worked a lot on the first inhabited island (Wimnim) it made sense to greatly reduce the amount of time you need to be stuck on your starting island. With that said, I've created an event which happens on the second day of being on your uninhabited island. I won't go into details as it would be spoiling the surprise, but I can say that you can now make it to Wimnim Island much faster.

What this means is a sort of fundamental shift in how the game is played for the first couple of hours. It was never my intent to make the player feel like the small uninhabited island you start on is the only area in the game you will ever see, and these new changes help reflect that.

Optimization

In-between all of this work, I like to take a break and try and do some optimization to the engine so that the game runs more smoothly. I'm happy to report that after some time spent optimizing some of the code, the game now runs smoother than ever. In fact, I believe it should run quite well even on older devices. I've optimized level chunk loading greatly, which means levels can have many more objects without any stuttering or loading lag as you walk around. :)

What's Next?

For the rest of this month I plan to continue to work on Wimnim Island, including finishing the remaining building artwork, adding more detailing around the island and adding a lot more dialogue for villagers. I also plan to work on some of the island projects, including the task line that will help you progress to the next inhabited island. :)

Also just as a side-note for backers who backed a Design tier, I will be reaching out in the coming month or two and really begin working on your designs! So keep a look out for messages. I'll reach out to you on your preferred chat method which you've already given me in our previous chats. I'm excited to get all of your ideas into the game!

That's all for this update, I hope everyone is doing well!

- Koni