Summer 2024 Update. More frequent updates to come!
3 months ago – Tue, Sep 03, 2024 at 10:00:54 AM

Hello everyone! It would appear I might have missed a *couple* of updates over the past months… For that, I apologize, and I'm going to try doing better with the update frequency moving forward. I'm being put on an actual update posting schedule, so new updates should be flowing on social media, here and even the Limbo discord channel moving forward!

The lack of updates has not meant that the game is not being worked on, in fact, what it really means is that I've been consuming my time with working on the game and really pushing it to be the best I can make it. But I'm only a single person doing the job of like a dozen people, so it's just been slow-going. If I could hire other people to help, I would do it right away. However I simply don't have the funding and it would take too much time to incorporate new people into the development process. Anyway, let's get on with the updates!

Limbo

There has been massive work on Limbo, with a prize shop and a half dozen or so mini-games added. For anyone not aware, Limbo is a realm which you go to when you run out of Health. In Limbo you will be able to play games using Spirit Tokens which you collect for every hour you're alive. You can spend your Spirit Tokens on fun prizes and upgrades in the Spirit Token Shop located in Limbo. I wanted to add this sort of feature because I've always felt like games where you simply die and respawn somewhere with less money or items is a bit boring. I wanted to make it interesting/exciting when you die, instead of feeling like a negative experience.

Here's a quick glimpse of some games in Limbo (not all are 100% finished) and also the prize shop!

But no worries, you don't *have* to die to get to Limbo, you can also drink a suspicious looking potion which will "transport" you there without doing any permanent damage. :)

Skills and Skill Rewards

Moving on to Skills. This is a feature I've been wanting to overhaul for a while, as my initial concept for Skill Goals and Rewards felt a bit boring after extensive playtesting. Before, you'd have to complete very specific requirements/achievements in order to unlock rewards for each skill category. However, the rewards felt very underpowered, such as ever so slightly increasing tool swing speed, or slightly increasing a chance for an additional item drop.

I've since moved to a more enjoyable system. The new skill system rewards you with Effort Drops, just for performing various skills. Whether it's chopping a tree, crafting a recipe, defeating a monster or catching a fish, you can now earn Effort Drops. Each Skill Category (of which there are 12) has multiple tiers of rewards. You'll be able to spend your Effort Drops on any rewards you want, in any Skill Category you prefer. These rewards are much better than what I had planned out previously. These can unlock entirely new abilities, and really feel like they make an impact when you acquire them!

Here you can see Effort Drops being collected from various activities and then spending Effort Drops to unlock mining cave walls!

I don't want to get into too much detail, as I'd rather leave it all as a surprise, but I will just say that it's a much more fun and robust experience to play, and now just doing everyday tasks feels good because you're earning towards fun unlocks no matter what you're doing.

Excavating, Fossils and Artifacts

Last update I also mentioned working on the Excavating skill in particular. Well I'm happy to report that it's now a fully fleshed out skill! With over 40 different Fossils to uncover (on top of the loads of Artifacts already added), and a color coded buried item detection system. Higher tier Shovels can now detect more types of buried items and indicate what type of item is buried using a color system. This means as you walk around with your Shovel equipped, you'll be able to detect from a distance where an item is buried and what type of item it is!

Decorations

I've also been busy working on lots of Décor options for Cloudscape, including rugs which can be dynamically sized, flower displays, potted flowers, flooring, paintings and portraits and more!

This is only covering about 2 months of work. I'm still leaving out TONS of work done to Villagers, Towns and Events which have taken up a good bulk of the development time.

Other Development

The list of bug fixes/optimizations/overall general improvements is about a mile long, so I won't bore anyone with the details, but I can confidently say I've touched practically every crevice of the game at some point over the last few months. I also had to take some time to completely update the game from Unity 2019 to Unity 2022, which involved quite a lot of fixes/code changes to get everything up and working again. The update was a long time overdue, as I wanted to be able to access some newer Unity features and just get an overall more updated Unity engine for the game itself.

I also switched from using Rewired as a control system to the new Unity Input system, which should lead to a nicer key rebinding interface and better platform compatibility. This change also took several days to implement but I believe it's 100% worth it as I'm no longer relying on a third party tool for controller support.

As for where the development completion is at right now, I still find it incredibly difficult to give an actual clear answer, as there are just far too many things I can't account for. I don't really want anyone to be anticipating a release around the corner, and I don't want to set a false release timeline that I can't keep, as it's clear that it only tends to make people upset when that day comes and goes.

All I can say is I'm working constantly on this game. It's a labor of love and I'm pouring everything into it. At the same time, I recognise everyone's anticipation for it and also quite frankly, given how many other developers have kinda stumbled on the Kickstarter path, to see signs of life and proof the game is being developed. So, because of that, I'm going to start taking a more structured approach to these updates, as well as a more regular social media schedule where I'll be posting about the game so everyone can witness what's happening! Please look forward to more frequent updates across social media and here. I hope you all will still be excited to play the game once it's finally released!

On a final note, due to the above, it's still not possible to put an exact date for an Early Access preview for backers. I don't want to rush getting the game into people's hands when it's simply not ready, and getting into a situation where I have to deliver something that isn't the ideal experience for you - just for the sake of just meeting a pre-set date - wouldn't be the best way for you to witness what you've helped me build. I sincerely appreciate everyone's patience on the matter.

-Koni

First update of 2024! Lots of artwork completed! Bees!
9 months 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!
11 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
about 1 year 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!
over 1 year 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