This week in the Forest! #19 (Patreon)

Yo folks!  Hope your March is going well :>

Let's start with A word from Vixel!

3/15 weekly report

Found and fixed some problems caused by my memory optimization work last week. One bug broke all the illustrated critter stories. (You could start them, but the game would softlock.) Also looks like there's a lag in WebGL builds when loading sex scenes, so we'll probably need to introduce a mini-loading screen for WebGL soon.

The rest of the week I've made good progress on the save system overhaul! (The goal is to save your progress between versions of the game.) I've been focusing on organizing the data first, dissecting what's in our current save file and deciding what it needs to look like going forward.

I've been standardizing our save file with rules like this:

• Savegame data must be meaningful (avoid using random hashes or ID numbers)
• Separators should always be the same character (underscore)
• Avoid unnecessary prefixes and suffixes
• Related elements should be grouped into their own lists (instead of sharing one big list)

So, I might save the following key and value to mark a conversation as played:

"act1__tutorial_quest__ask_otter_for_sugar" | "completed"

Or store an inventory item like this:

{ "itemType": "driftwood", "quantity": 11, "consumed": false }

Each rule makes the save file cleaner and more organized, and helps me spot problem areas that need more focus. This overhaul is going well, but it isn't ready for this month's build! :O I need to be very careful because these changes have the potential to introduce a LOT of tricky bugs. (Save files will eventually exist on people's PCs, and I can't debug them there!) So we should see the new save system finished in next month's build! ^^

- Vixel

-----

On my end - I actually took a bit of a break at the beginning of the week, then got hella snowed on the past few days (LOTS OF SHOVELING) :x! So a bit of a slow week from me.

That said, the illustrations for our next build, and their accompanied stories are completely done/portrait'd out! (Maverick's Story, and Bucky/Augustus Date) Writing-wise I was having some issues with ironing our these interactions, but in the end I'm really happy with how they came out :> They both offer something a bit unique in the exchange, and stuff to build on in the future!

Some additional progress on the Finley/Rascal animation, but still gotta make some serious progress on it, and I started roughing out a concept for the next animation. 

For the sake of showing stuff, I've got some old sketches that we won't be using for the upcoming stories :> They're kinda spicy tho, so they might make a comeback...

This was cute! But didn't quite fit the energy I wanted.

I dig how dynamic this one was! But it also didn't quiiiiiiite serve the purpose I wanted. This one in particular might make a come back tho ;o

I've also been prepping the main locations. There's a few touch ups, but mainly adding in a few new things regarding those gifts that we implemented a bit ago! 

We DO NOT have any new functionality for those gifts this next build, but we wanna tackle that for-sure next month. We have a lot planned (Particularly for The Monocle and Rosetta Stone, but they aren't quite ready to put in just yet.)

Speaking of builds, we'll be releasing this month's pretty soon! It's a bit light on content, since we're in that awkward tune-up/clean-up phase. But game-dev be like that |3

Other than that 10$+ Patreons look out for the next poll! I'll be making it today, this one will be a date with ladies! We need more ladies :>! 

OK! That's it for us!

Hope your March has been going well!