MEGA July Update! Wimnim Island and Villager development update! Delay announcement...
over 1 year 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

HUGE update to wrap up February! Lots of info about Villagers, Shopping and Mail!
over 1 year ago – Thu, Mar 02, 2023 at 08:17:25 AM

Hey everyone! It's been some time since the last update and I have been super busy with development so I'm going to try and include mostly everything I've been doing but I might leave a few things out.

So for the past two months I've been primarily focusing on NPCs (non-playable characters) otherwise known as the Villagers of Cloudscape. I've been touching on many different aspects and systems, including but not limited to:

• Villager routines/waypoints
• Villager dialogue and Affection system
• Villager gifting
• Town Board/Villager Requests
• Shops
• Sending and Receiving Mail
• Placing buildings around Wimnim and creating placeholder room layouts

Villager Routines/Waypoints

To kick things off, one of the first things I got to work on was making sure the villagers could move around the island and get to various destinations to perform their daily routines. This involved setting up custom nodes which can link together to allow the villagers to calculate the fastest route to any given point on the island.

As of writing this, Wimnim Island alone has over 200 waypoints! With many more to be added as the island gets more filled out.

Above video shows waypoints/connections for villagers to travel. (will not appear in game, only for debugging purposes)

I've also set up many of the villagers basic schedules. These are driven through Schedule Events. The basic idea of a Schedule Event is that it has a list of Conditions that need to be met to trigger the event, and then a couple of Outcome parameters to decide what actions to perform. For example, a villager might have a Schedule Event where the conditions are that on a certain day of the week at a specific time, they will travel to a specific location, face a specific direction and perform a specific animation. With these basic actions, villagers can move all around the island and do all sorts of things!

(above video shows a simplified routine for one villager, this is a heavy WIP so please don't mind the unfinished buildings/environments!)

Around a dozen of these events allows most villagers to have a full routine where they can wake up, get dressed, eat, go to work, work throughout the day, then go home to eat dinner, relax and go to sleep. As the game develops more, each villager will have many more Schedule Events added to really give them a lot of flexibility in what they can do and where they can go. Villagers will even travel to other islands!

Villager Dialogue

Villagers would be pretty boring if all they did was walk around... so the next thing to do was focus a bit on the dialogue system and affection system.

I set up Chat Events, which behave quite similar to Schedule Events. Just like with Schedule Events, Chat Events have a list of conditions that must be met in order for specific dialogue to be triggered. Some of these conditions can be location, weather, time of day, season and of course the villager's affection toward you. So far I've set up a couple lines of dialogue for all of the villagers in Wimnim. They also have dialogue for when they receive gifts. Speaking with and gifting villagers will help raise their affection toward you... However, this isn't a single static value. Instead, it's actually two different values.

Each villager has both a friendship level and romantic level which you can increase. I've decided to split these up because I've noticed that in most social games, the option to just be good friends with people is not really available. Which leads to a lot of people falling in love with you that you don't really have any romantic interest in! I wanted to change that, so now in order to get romantic interest from a villager, you will need to first reach a certain friendship level with them and then gift them a special item. This will unlock the romantic system, and from there you can start building up your romance level in order to date and eventually marry eligible villagers.

The overall goal of this system is that you'll be able to max out friendship with everyone without having their dialogue shift toward romantic stuff. Finally you can just be good friends with someone! This means the dialogue for villagers will actually be determined by both friendship AND romantic levels.

Villager Gifting

Gifting villagers works quite as you would expect. You can hold an item and walk up to interact with a villager. When you do this, the villager will first ask if you are giving them the item. This is a nice safeguard in case you accidentally didn't mean to give them the item. There is also no penalty for canceling an item gifting.

If you say yes, the villager will respond with unique dialogue depending on their preference for the gift. Villagers can hate, dislike, be neutral toward, like and love various items. You may learn about their preferences through talking to them. If you give a villager a disliked or hated gift, they will lose some affection for you. However, the first time you give a villager any disliked or hated gift, it will actually not count against you! Whenever a non-neutral gift is given to a villager, their preference for it will be added to their villager profile. What this basically means is that you can know which items not to give them again without taking a penalty.

Villagers also will each have their own inventories! This means whatever you gift them they will keep. This can lead to special dialogue about items you gifted them. They might also even wear hats or other accessories. (totally not copying that Animal game :P)

Town Board/Villager Requests

After setting up basic villager routines and interactions with the player, I wanted to also work on setting up the Town Board which allows villagers to place Requests which the player can try to complete. Requests can vary from simply bringing the villager certain items, to actually doing deliveries, being asked to speak to other villagers on their behalf, or having to go out and perform various tasks in different locations.

Villagers will provide you with a secret reward after completing requests. I decided to not show what the reward is ahead of time in order to encourage players to try out different requests to get the mystery reward. I hope this will make it feel less like work and more like prolonging a surprise. :) Villagers will also gain some affection when you complete their tasks, so it's another way to help boost affection along with speaking to them and giving them gifts.

Shops

I've add a few different shops around Wimnim Island so far. They include Frut's General Store, where you can buy seeds and supplies along with some clothing and furniture. There's also the Bait and Tackle, where you can buy various fishing bait and tools, along with getting your fish weighed there. If you can beat the record weights for each fish, you will receive a special reward!

I've also added Rin's Ranch, where you can purchase animal supplies and of course, some cute little animals! As of now you can purchase the bare minimum to get started with ranching, including a Chick. But in order to actually purchase animals, you'll first need a barn... which you can buy over at Bagaroot's Builds. This is the local carpenter who will offer up building blueprints and other useful structures. Here you can buy the Tropical Barn Blueprint, and place the barn on your island. Once you have a barn, you can purchase up to 8 animals to inhabit it. There isn't currently a limit to how many Barns you can have on your own island... only until you run out of actual land! I'll get into more details about Ranching in later updates, but so far it has all of the basics in there to take care of your animals.

Another feature of shops is the ability to sell your items to the shop. When you sell items, they will also get added to a special Sold Tab, which you can access to buy back your items. Just in case you accidentally sell something you didn't want to, or you change your mind!

Shops will also have seasonal items and even items that get rotated in and out daily! This means you might find a different piece of furniture on Tuesday that wasn't there on Monday! I'm hoping this will encourage players to frequent the shops more in order to find new things. But no worries if you don't want to visit every shop every day trying to track down certain items... because you can subscribe to a shop's Mailing List and get new item updates in the mail! Speaking of which...

Sending and Receiving Mail

I'm currently midway through completing the mail system for Cloudscape, but I'd like to just talk a bit about how it all works. Wimnim Island is home to a post office called the Gull Post. Here you can obtain your first Shipping Bin and you can also buy Mailboxes and all sorts of stationary, postcards, gift boxes and envelopes to send mail!

When you place down a mailbox on your island, you'll be able to start receiving mail from villagers. Villagers will send you mail based on a variety of factors, primarily their affection level toward you, and also if you send them mail as well. There are three types of mail you can send and receive: Postcards, Letters and Packages

Postcards are the simplest form of mail. These are simply decorative cards with a message written on them.

Letters include both Stationary and an Envelope. A letter can also include a small attached item, like money, coupons or other bits.'

Packages include a note and an attached item.

When receiving mail, you can open your mailbox and transfer the mail to your inventory. From there, you can open it at your leisure. When sending mail, you can place either an empty envelope, blank postcard or empty shipping box into your mailbox. This will trigger the Letter interface, where you can pick a recipient, write a message and attach an item. If you aren't keen on writing out messages all the time, there will also be the option to choose a pre-written note instead!

Villagers might even have a preference for the type of postcards, stationary or gift wrapping, which can further help boost their affection. Aside from simply another way to boost affection, when you mail gifts to villagers they might mail gifts back! You never know what you might receive in the mail.

Various shops may also send you coupons in the mail. These coupons could offer limited time deals and discounts in shops, so these are definitely something you want to keep an eye out for!

As mentioned above, you can also subscribe to mailing lists for shops. This means you'll receive news about new products added to shops, special events, and other notices like a change to shop hours or a shop closing temporarily.

Building out Wimnim

Finally I just wanted to briefly talk about the progress for Wimnim Island that isn't entirely villager related. The island of course has a variety of buildings scattered around it. I've been working to add these buildings into the game, and have added pretty much all of the buildings for the island so far. Of course, these are really crude right now, and simply let me be aware of the size and placement of each building on the island. It also lets me set up all of the villager waypoints in and around the buildings. I can then use them to set up routines for the villagers. This is all the first steps into bringing the island to life.

In the coming months I will work more to further update these buildings to each be unique and have their own artwork. I will also be adding a lot more detailing around the island and some more points of interest for both the player and the villagers.

Other Stuff

There's still a lot I haven't touched on in this update... including but not limited to:

• Completely updating the lighting system to be more optimized and improved
• Rewrote how the game handles keeping track of what villagers you've spoken to, gifted, etc.
• Optimized the game code quite a bit
• Completely reimplemented Buildings and their complex layering with interior walls, doors and windows
• Added a lot of base villager portraits
• Added monetary value to over 100 different items, each calculated based on the item's base value and what materials it is comprised of
• Added 31 different Dye items which will later be used to dye clothing and other items
• Added dozens of recipes for items that didn't have them. Mainly to keep track of the item's monetary value

Oh... and I almost forgot that I had a random idea to add fragrances to the game... so I spent 1 day implementing that. :)

Fragrances!

There are 4 different types of fragrances the player can use. When used, the player gets a buff applied to them for 8 hours. The buff depends on the fragrance used. The 4 fragrance types are Sweet, Spicy, Musky and Fresh.

The current use for fragrances is to increase affection with villagers when speaking to them. Each villager has a preferred fragrance which you can learn about. If you speak to a villager while wearing their preferred fragrance, you will gain extra affection that day.

One important thing to note... you can only wear one fragrance at a time! If you use two fragrances, you will actually instead get a Bad Smell debuff! If you talk to villagers with the Bad Smell debuff, you will not receive ANY affection from them that day! But no worries, it's quite easy to fix the problem. All you need to do is hop into some water to wash off the Bad Smell. Even standing in the rain will wash it away. Just be careful, this applies to good smelling fragrances too, so it's best not to try wearing fragrances on a rainy day!

I have some ideas on how to build on to this feature of the game later on as well. I'd like to possibly have various monsters interact with the player differently based on fragrances. There will also be ways for the player to craft fragrances or simply buy them from a shop.

Wrapping It Up

That's all for this update! Again, I'm definitely forgetting some stuff, but I hope this update helps ease anyone's concern about the game's development progress. I'm working pretty much every day on the game, even if the update frequency might not reflect it much!

Thanks everyone for your continued support and I can't wait for everyone to play this game!

- Koni

December update! Dungeons, movers, machines, and treads, refining the early game and your journey as Kumo!
almost 2 years ago – Wed, Dec 28, 2022 at 11:33:37 PM

Hi everyone! We're back with another periodical update for the game. The last time an update was published was in September, and I wanted to cap off the year with one final post for 2022. Especially given the time of year, I thought it'd be good to deliver you a bunch of goodness new to the game! Admittedly, September was quite a while ago... but rest assured I've been fully focused on the game's development. So with all that said, one final other thing to say before getting into things: Merry Christmas!

Machines, movers, treads, mechanics and more

So, a large feature in Cloudscape will be the dungeons that you can eventually explore in order to help find things that'll help you progress through each island, and eventually the whole world. Dungeons contain puzzles, obstacles and monsters to challenge the player. As part of this, I first created basic systems to support things like togglable traps, moving hazards bottomless pits.

For example, in the animation above you can see a conveying block automated on a tread, toggling two switches which then trigger the spike hazards at the bottom. Many of these buttons, switches, levers and triggerable objects will be available to the player to create their own contraptions.

Color Blindness Accessibility

One thing I always have in the back of my mind is how accessible the game will be for different people. I have several friends who have different color blindness and so I always do my best to design objects and menus in a way that are still easily readable. Here is an example of the red, green and blue buttons/switches and obstacles for someone who is red/green colorblind. With the contrast in colors and the patterns/symbols on various objects, it's possible to tell at a glance what switch triggers what object.

Sometimes I still might miss this sort of thing, so if you have any sort of colorblindness or feel like Cloudscape is lacking in accessibility in some area, please don't hesitate to let me know!

Here are a few videos highlighting some of the Dungeon mechanics in action!

(Push and Pull Blocks on to switches to trigger blockades. Special colored buttons reset all of the colored Blocks in the area)

(An obstacle room has you dodging moving obstacles to avoid falling into the pit!)

(A seriously dangerous floor spike room! Every automated obstacle in dungeons is driven by an actual trigger being activated. Here the movers pass over the colored buttons, which deactivate the floor spikes that match those colors)

A softer landing

One thing that's become apparent through internal testing, is that the beginning of the game didn't provide a clear enough path for the player to move forward. The main goal in Cloudscape is to leave the uninhabited island you wake up on, and travel to many different islands where you will meet all sorts of different inhabitants and discover all sorts of new things. 

With the way beginning of the game was structured, this wasn't communicated very clearly, and the player's needs were a bit nebulous - there was a dialog line in the backpack you pick up off the beach implying you need to meet someone, but it was easy to mistake this as throwaway flavor text, as opposed to a statement orienting the player towards a long-term goal. 

The result of this came through in testing, where a lot of testers ended up playing the game as if it was a generic survival sandbox game, not realizing there is actually progression and storyline beyond just staying alive. That said, the open-world and sandbox nature of the game is still crucial to Cloudscape, so any solution to this couldn't be overly controlling or linear.

The solution to this problem, without overly restricting the player or removing the potential for open-ended gameplay, turned out to be quite simple: just create something which is a direct representation to the player of a long-term goal! This came in the form of adding a wrecked dock and raft within earshot of the opening scene; the player still reads the letter you find on the beach from Bagaroot, telling you to find a way off and come meet them eventually. But combined with the wrecked docks and raft nearby, the implication is immediately drawn to the player's mind that this is the method of leaving the island, providing a light structure and general direction for gameplay, without the restrictiveness of creating an actual linear requirement. The opening's no longer just a throwaway line, but rather an important piece of context that has a direct meaning for the player.

A cool side-effect of improving the opening's design was the creation of whole new systems/mechanics to support it, too! In order to have the wrecked dock and raft be repairable, a new... well... repair system was created! As you can see from the video above, buildings/structures that you can repair or interact with will now prompt you for materials, and give you an option on what to do. I actually planned to have the player repairing various structures on different islands later on in the game, so this worked out nicely as it was already a needed feature.

Other changes and improvements

I've been working on all sorts of things, so I'll list a few things below with some footage to show progress.

I've added various types of Debris to the player's starting island. This debris will spawn in randomly over time. At the moment it consists of sticks, logs, roots, weeds and small rocks. Debris has two purposes, the first is to give the player an objective to clean up the island and improve its appearance. The second is to provide another method of obtain wood and stone. Because the island does not respawn trees and rocks, it's important that the player still has ways to get access to those resources if they clear their entire island. Wood and Stone can now be obtain directly from trees/rocks, but also from Debris and from washing up on the beach. This ensures the player never gets soft locked from being able to build simple tools to progress in the game.

Debris has also been added into Caves, along with new Stalactite and Stalagmite objects. The player can break Stalagmites to obtain Stone, Dirt and Sand, along with a new material, Calcite, which will later be used in various crafting recipes.

I've also added all of the fish to the Starting Island. There are currently 45 types of fish to catch on the starting island alone!

I've also been busy adding various settings to the game, which will improve the quality of life for players in a variety of ways. Here is the latest setting added, which is the Item Auto-Collect option. Enabling this will allow the player to automatically pick up items within a certain distance away. This works much like you would find in other games in the genre, so if you prefer to have automated item pickup, you can enable this option!

Finally I have started adding different weapons for the player to use in the game. Here's a quick demo of the Bow and Arrows being used! You will be able to collect the arrows that get stuck in the wall or other objects for a brief period of time. Arrows also penetrate through multiple enemies, so they can be quite powerful when you line them up to go through several enemies at the same time!

Shoutout time: Windswept!

Lastly, we're ending this update by paying it forward for another developer looking to run a Kickstarter soon: Windswept! Classic platforming is back, and it's brought company! Windswept is a 2D collect-a-thon platformer paying homage to the good old days. After a gigantic storm blows them away, a duck and turtle friends try to find their way home. Play as both 🦆Marbles and 🐢Checkers by tag-teaming -- You control the lead character while the other follows close behind. 

Available with local co-op, and with a treasure trove of hidden challenges, bonuses, and secret modes, as well as 5 different regions with more friends to meet along the way, Windswept is inspired by the legends of both retro and modern platforming such as Donkey Kong Country 2, Celeste, and Yoshi's Island. Be sure to sign up for their campaign launch by clicking this link, or the image below!

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That's all for this update! I hope everyone is doing well and having a happy holiday! I will likely have another Dev Log video to release some time in January so look out for that. For now it's time for a short holiday break and then it's right back to work on Cloudscape!

- Koni

September Update! Animals, Shipments, Journal Pages, New Lighting and Villagers!
about 2 years ago – Fri, Sep 16, 2022 at 06:21:28 PM

I'm back with a new update!

Development is still chugging along at full speed. I've just finished a new Development Log video that is posted to YouTube which covers a bit of what I will talk about in this update. You can watch that here:

Animals

Last update I talked about implementing animals, and showed off the Chicks moving around. I've since added the adult Chicken with 10 different color variations! Chickens now seek out food and water, will sleep periodically, and of course… you can pet your chickens to raise their affection levels!

There's also an Animals list which shows all of the animals you currently own, and various useful information for each one at a glance.

Collections

I've also implemented a rough first pass of the Collections page in the Journal, which allows you to view all of the items you've collected or discovered throughout the world. There will be some additional features added to this later on in development which should be pretty useful.

Shipping Containers and Shipments

I've also fully implemented Shipping Containers, which work mostly like they do in other farming games in the genre, however there are a few key differences. You can place your Shipping Container anywhere on your island, and you can also place as many as you'd like. You can access your Shipping Container just like other Storage objects, which means you can drop items in or take items out whenever you'd like.

You can also drop items directly into the Shipping Container without opening the inventory interface. At 8AM each day, all items in the Shipping Containers will be collected and the lid will be left open with a Receipt attached. When you interact with the Shipping Container, you will collect the money for the items sold, and the Receipt will get added to your Journal for later viewing.

This feature has also be implemented, and you can see here that you're able to check each Receipt to see an itemized list of everything that was sold that day.

Fishing Skill Goals

I've added all of the Skill Goals and Rewards for the Fishing skill, so now you'll earn all sorts of boosts and rewards to fishing simply by hitting these skill milestones through fishing! These might be tweaked throughout testing but the end goal is to give an additional layer of bonuses to players as they progress through fishing throughout the game.

New Lighting System

I've also been implementing a new lighting system with dynamic lighting and shadows. This is a big improvement both visually and performance-wise. Objects in the world will now react to lighting and cast shadows, creating a much more ambient environment. More work is needed to really make this look good, so it's still a work in progress for the time being.

Wimnim Island Villagers

I've spent time working on the villagers for Wimnim Island. There is now a base sprite for every villager and I've been working on writing their bios, dialogue and more. Here's a handful of villagers I've been working on!

Most of my time is spent working on Wimnim Island right now, and I'm slowly building it up, adding more details to the island, more shops, more points of interests, etc. I'm also currently re-working how I've set up buildings as I want them to be even more dynamic and flexible to allow for more customization and options.

Shoutout: Paper Animal RPG!

Paper Animal RPG is a game that's all sort of fuzzy and cute! Taking place in a papercrafted world, in Paper Animal RPG you and your band of animal adventurers have to go on a quest to find the missing king. As you cross the world, and explore different dungeons, you'll meet other critters on their own journeys, fight dastardly enemies like talking tomapples, shroomheads, and... some slightly scary things, and at the end of it, relax by the campfire together as you sort out dinner.

Paper Animal RPG is currently running their own Kickstarter, so if you're a fan of all things animal and cute related go check them out!

That's all for this update. I hope everyone is doing well out there, and I can't wait for everyone to play this game when it's finished! Thanks for your support!

- Koni

New Development Update: Adding a new island, shopping, villagers, animals and more!
over 2 years ago – Fri, Jul 01, 2022 at 08:41:03 PM

Hey everyone! Thanks for the patience with these sporadic updates. As development progresses I find myself drifting farther away from frequent post-writing and focusing more on the development of the game itself. With that said, expect fewer update posts for the duration of the game's development. And by that I mean just on the written updates - actual progress and updates on the game itself are going faster than ever! I still plan to update everyone on the progress, however I won't be adhering to a monthly update schedule or anything of that nature, as it's adding a bit more stress and time away from development than I prefer. 

The reality is, that as I get further into developing the game, a substantial amount of work is done on the day-by-day implementation and design of really complicated systems - and most of that boils down to putting down lines of code, concepting data structures, etc., and it's really hard to make a public update focusing on those. Not very thrilling stuff to see. However, when all of that comes together for a system - like the scheduling and pathfinding systems detailed below, it's easy to show that working visually! Hence, update posts will become a bit less regular as I finish building out the game's most complex systems, but once these are done I'll be able to give everybody a sneak peek at them.

With that out of the way, lets get into what I've been working on, as I'm excited to share with you!

Wimnim Island

Work has started on putting together the first fully hand-crafted island the player will get to visit in the game. Wimnim is a tropical island with a year round temperate climate, meaning it doesn't really experience cold winters or harsh summers. The island is inhabited by plant-like people with pointy ears.  As of writing this, there are currently 18 villagers inhabiting the island. These villagers will all have homes on the island and many of them run businesses as well.

The island is host to a General Store, Museum, Ranch, Farm, Carpenter's Hut and more.

Visiting this island will give players their first chance of interacting with other (living) characters in the game, along with the ability to buy and sell all sorts of items at the various shops.

First Step

The first goal I needed to tackle was to get players from the starting island over to Wimnim Island. I had already created a Dock and Raft for this purpose, but for most of the game's development, the Raft didn't do anything. Now the Raft has the option to use it for traveling off of the island! For now, the traveling is instant between the two islands, however I plan to add a map which will appear when accessing the Raft, so that the player can choose what destination they would like to travel to. But for testing purposes, just going back and forth between the two islands works for now.

Another obvious step was for me to actually generate the island and start designing the areas. I've laid out the general shape of the island and the areas to be found on it, however much work will be needed to refine this and add in all of the details, buildings and more.

General Store

For now I wanted to at least add one important building, and that's the General Store. So I went about creating a larger building asset along with some new artwork for it. I needed to set up buildings in the game, so now buildings will load in properly and the player can enter and exit the buildings. Upon entering, the exterior will fade away seamlessly.

The next important feature to add was to include a new character to interact with, and also set up the shop system.

It made the most sense to just... make the new character the shop keeper, so that's what I did. The shop keeper of the General Store is named Cheri Frut and her shop is simply called "Frut's".

At Frut's, you can purchase a lot of general goods, including Seeds, Grass Plugs, Sod, a variety of resources and also some Tropical clothing and decorations.

The shop system is still a heavy WIP, but I've managed to get buying/selling items working nicely. The plan is to also add a portrait/dialogue of the shop keeper at the top of the screen. There they can talk with you while you shop. They might mention new items added, sales, or just help you with your shopping process.

One feature that hasn't been added is the ability to check a "sold" tab to see what items you recently sold to the shop, with the option to buy those items back. Just in case you accidentally sell something you didn't intend to.

Schedules and Routes

In order for Cheri to run her General store, she needs to actually get to and from work! So the next rather complicated step was to create schedules for villagers to adhere to, along with creating some type of pathfinding so that villagers could go from one location to another properly.

After quite a lot of fiddling around, I settled on having villagers use a node based path system to navigate their islands. This allows me to designate waypoints so the villagers know *exactly* where to position themselves. By setting up all of these waypoints, the villager can navigate along them to find the shortest path to their destination, while avoiding any sort of obstacles.

Then it's just a matter of setting up their schedules. I've created events which can be triggered through a lot of different conditions. Time of day, weather, season, special festivities, and more. It will even prioritize events which happen on specific days instead of more generic days. For example, if a villager usually walks to a certain location on Mondays, I could have an event set up that specifically triggers on the second Monday in the month. That event will override the normal Mondays event.

With all that said, what this does is it gives me a lot of flexibility in setting up villagers so that they have more dynamic activity in the world. Instead of always sticking to a very strict routine, villagers can diverge if certain conditions are met.

Here's an example of Cheri navigating to work along the node paths (village area is unfinished and node paths are only being displayed for debugging purposes)

 Animals and Global Pathfinding

After doing all of this I decided to switch things up and work on getting animals properly implemented into the game. My goal is to hopefully set up the Ranch on Wimnim Island where you'll be able to purchase animals to place on your own island. With the shop system, villager routine and path system, and animal behavior system in place, it will be fairly easy to implement this. So my next goal was to get animals properly moving around on your island.

A tricky aspect to this, which people might not be aware of, is that the island loads objects in chunks based on the player's location on the island. This is to help with performance and memory issues. I wouldn't want to load in thousands of objects all at once, or it would cause the game to be very slow. So early in the game's development I made the decision to use a chunk system to handle this. While that works great and is very stable at this point, it causes a HUGE issue with creating pathfinding around the island.

The issues is that I have all animals loaded into the island at the same time, but not all animals are within the range of the player. You may have animals at the north most part of your island, while you are chilling at the south most part of your island. This means they are up there with no chunks loaded in. That's not great, because without chunks, there's no objects, and without objects, the animals don't know how to navigate around them. What could happen is you'd walk to the north of your island, objects would load in, and the animal would get stuck on top of them.

To solve this headache, I needed to essentially create a 2D array which will store the information of every single block on the island, without needing to actually have the terrain or objects physically present in the scene. This involved using terrain data and chunk data to create a "map" of walkable spaces.

The end result looks like this:

This is basically what animals and monsters will "see" when deciding where to move. They can see this map regardless of whether the map or objects are physically loaded into the game. This means they can always properly navigate the world... even if it isn't there.

The next step was to actually create a pathfinding algorithm to do this. This was probably the easiest part of the whole process. I just used a pretty standard A* pathfinding algorithm and tweaked it to fit the game rules. Here's how that looks in action:

In this video example, I've set the starting location to the player's location, and the target location to the mouse cursor. When I click the mouse, it updates the path to show the shortest path to the target location. This is represented by the blue squares that appear. These are the destination points that animals/monsters will navigate to. The algorithm is set up to try and avoid walking right up against terrain like cliffs. This provides a more natural looking movement. Otherwise animals might hug the cliff walls to navigate and that would look odd.

With pathfinding out of the way, I went about actually adding animals into the game. Here's the current state of animals:

So far I've added Chicks into the game. These currently perform proper movement and animations, along with respecting the physics of the world. The player can push animals around (easier or harder depending on their size) and will soon be able to interact with them (petting them, picking them up, etc)

As of now, the animals don't use the pathfinding system and instead use a very crude random directional movement to just move around randomly. That's actually the next thing on my list to do!

Once I've got the Chicks using the new pathfinding system, I'll be implementing more interactions and finally getting the shop set up so you can purchase these Chicks and place them on your island to take care of.

Player Journal

Finally I wanted to note I've done a lot of work on the player's Journal which is an interface that lets you see all sorts of information on various things in the game. You can check your Personal Info which will display all of your own stats along with your current appearance and whatever buffs/debuffs you currently have, and how they affect you. You can check the Calendar which tracks all of the game's special events, villager birthdays and more. You can check the Social page which lists all of the villagers, along with details and affection levels.

There are also pages for Animals, all of your Buildings, Collections of items, all of your Shipments and also your Mail. Those are all still early WIP so I'll have to show them later. :)

Other Stuff

Along the development process I also typically go back and play the game from the beginning and just find things I didn't finish developing, or check for bugs or issues with balance. I've made a TON of changes to things I haven't mentioned. Things like tweaking Kumo's walk cycle, adding new uses for the Campfire, updating and adding new Tasks, fixing various tools including the Water Pump, fixed a bug with Harvesting and picking up items, and disabling a lot of unneeded features while in Limbo. I wish I could talk more about all the little stuff I've added and/or changed, but I think it's best to just focus on development and let the final game speak for itself. :)

That's all for this update. Thank you everyone for your continued support. Not sure when the next update will be, but you can always check out the Twitter page or visit the Discord to find small updates or chat with me directly about the game's development.

- Koni