SprintingCucumbers
patreon
Devlog #29 Overview and Timelines
🕑 Added 2024-04-12 14:05:24 +0000 UTCHi all, I fell off the wagon on the devlog train last year (after doing so well for a WHOLE two months...), but I'm going to try to make scheduled weekly updates again.
This week has been a post mortem for the previous update version; figuring out what I did well, what I did poorly, and what I should never do again because what the hell was I thinking. After that was finished, I sat down with my manager (wife) to create a realistic scope and timeline for the next release version, which is what I'm presenting here.
This one is intended to include two major changes:
Event Management and Scheduler:
This is two-pronged and is anticipated to take up most of my coding time. The Event Manager is a system to keep track of events seen by the player and provide hints/guidance to find unseen content. It's easy to write out, but I'm expecting it to take a lot of time and hair-pulling.
I'm also adding an event scheduler that is not just me writing out a million if/then statements in the map screen code. It is a mess and I think science will eventually prove that my map screen code causes cancer.
The scheduler is intended to solve two problems. First, it will clear my code and place all of the logic in blocks outside of the map for easier access. This is for my own sanity and will not impact player experience. Second, since I'm doing it, I need to improve it. The old event logic was 3 or 4 sets of random events that were populated in the morning. Nothing you did could change what the game decided you were going to see (other than backtracking and having it randomly decide again). I've decided to remove a lot of the random ambiguity in the event logic moving forward. There will still be some random variation, but it will no longer be the only method the game uses to decide what choices you have. Things like what day it is, your relationship status, and what you did in the morning will now be used to influence the movements of the characters on the map.
This will also come with an expansion of smaller every-day types of scenes. A quick example of the general event changes:
- In normal gameplay, the chicken catching event with Marla happens once every 3 days. It happened yesterday.
- In the morning, you go to the kitchen (newly available) and talk to Luna. You discuss corn-based breakfast options. Suddenly you're hungry for chicken. "But we had chicken last night," your Mom says with a sigh. "Well, ok."
- Now it's afternoon; Horace is on the map for training. You go to see him. He starts off the conversation with "I heard you wanted more chicken." Normal training ensues.
- In the evening, the game shifts Marla away from her normally scheduled event for the day and places her at the chicken coup for a quick round of chicken catchin'.
Dungeon Tent:
It's coming. I've committed a lot of time in this release plan to get this done. And I intend to do it right... dungeon camping, succubus dungeon camping... every single one of those things.
This includes additions to dungeon dialogue to account for variations in relatioship status and a lot of new rendered scenes for dungeons (story and wild).
Some smaller additions:
- The game is getting a Scene Gallery to let the player rewatch events they've already found. (Kermit is excited about that one) (Also, it's already totally finished, so this one won't be getting cut for time)
- Soul Box is getting an upgrade to level 8 (with an epic movie... still frame is below).
- Status effects are being added to cooking recipes (these are buffs for the next day's fighting... things like 'double xp', 'double attack', 'skills cost half mp', etc). The planned cooking content has been cut to only include these code-based changes because the Dungeon Tent is expected to cost a LOT of computer hours in production and render times.
- Lani's sneak content will finally be completed (the remaining scenes are about 65% finished as I type this, so I'm confident this time it'll actually all be in there).
- The first life is going to be currated moving forward. This means that the new players (or players restarting the game) will be given limited action choices in the beginning as a sort of soft tutorial. The game will open up entirely starting at around day 20, then the chicken will kill you at day 30 (as is the way of the world).
It seems like a lot, I think, but it's actually pretty reasonable. The timeline right now is to enter alpha testing in the middle of May (which is when I anticipate the majority of the coding portion of this release to be finished). The renders are planned to be finished at or around the middle of June, which will be the beta phase of testing (just making sure everything is in the right place and scenes activate as planned). After that, the general release is planned for the end of June.
Cheers!
