This week in the Forest! #32 (Patreon)

YO FOLKS! Lots to talk about this week!

FIRST, we wanted to show you guys something we've been planning for a few months now! It's a mini-game! CHECK IT OUT!

This GIF displays a ton of the systems that Vixel's prototyped out! Spawning, Targeting, Despawning, (choosing which attack?), Telegraphed zones, hitbox counting, "flinching"/i-Frames, SO MUCH SHIT HERE :> He really didn't do it justice in his lil' paragraph down there, the system is SO SLICK it's crazy. I want Vixel to do another educational/tutorial gif on the system sometime, it's hella sexy how it's set up.

OK SO WHAT THE HECK IS ALL THIS?! Why is DUSTIN trying to KILL YOU?!

Ah he's not, of course. To those caught up with the story, we've got a lil quest that divulges that he's building a workout arena. This is one of his fitness courses! Dustin gets to show you his SWEET MOVES, and you get to dodge/run for your life! It's a good workout for all!

OK, so I wanted to do some Game Dev talk here:

Like most games, one of the things that is CRUCIAL for the success of our game, is to have a SOLID experience and immersion for the player.

One of the questions we needed to solve was - How can we get people to want to spend MORE time in our world? 

So far we've spent a lot of time fleshing out how the player interacts with the Characters...

But how else can we have the player enjoy our world? Can we take advantage of our current systems? What sorts of goals do we have as game devs? Any smaller projects that we might be able to incorporate? 

As y'all have seen from our Plant Mini-Game - we've wanted to incorporate lil ways to break up the gameplay loop. This mini game is gonna be a lot different in that it's NOT required, and QUITE expandable! We'll likely have an easy/medium/hard etc where we could really experiment with how to make something fun and exciting, and have some fun way to challenge the player if they want to =)

It let's us push our current systems to support newer concepts (Hitboxes, Telegraphing, "damage" etc) that can eventually be expanded on in the future ;O! 

OK, I don't wanna spoil too much more. But we're super stoked for this minigame, and the future ones we've got planned =)!

Let's continue with A Word from Vixel!

Heya floofs! <3

This week I finished a rough prototype of our minigame for Dustin the squirrel! The minigame uses Red's dashroll to avoid various attacks that Dustin launches into an arena. The gif here shows one of the attack types. (For this demo gif, Dustin spawns on a random edge, picks a random point on the opposite edge, and charges up an attack!) I'll be fleshing out several other attack types this week.

Also been reviewing the game's code architecture to come up with better designs. We have lingering bugs like the game softlocking when shearing Finley, fast travel perch interactions breaking, scenes flickering when they first load, savegames not reloading, etc. Most of these bugs are related to scripts running out of order, and the issues come from design conflicts rather than Unity's internal timing.

For example, you get wildly different results depending on which order these three events occur:

- load a savegame and set the value of triggers

- spawn a character if a certain trigger is set

- despawn an object if a certain character is in the scene

I'm aiming to come up with designs and conventions that guarantee events happen in a more predictable order, which should clean up a lot of those stray bugs. Yay for growing pains! XD

See you next week!! ^^

--

On my side I've been doing even more Act 3 stuff! We're like, a few interactions away from having Act 3 totally scripted. The way is BASICALLY paved! Super exciting!

During planning Act 3, I decided it'd be good to have a visual representation of the ancient glyphs that will be around in the Forest. So I made a font to accommodate this, check it out! 

What could it saaaaaaaaaaay?? :O! (Spoiler alert, don't try to decode it, it's nothing)

I've also been toying with some animation shiz that is very spoiler-y so I can't show it. But it's pretty dope. ;)

Lastly - I wanted to give ya guys an update on my eyes :O! For some reason, the past few days have been VERY manageable! I'm thinking either the medicine is starting to work its magic, or we have a hunch that my AC might've really been hard on the dry eye. Regardless, spirits have been WAY higher, and I'm gonna do my best to get some more work done this week :> While taking taking it easy, of course.

But all in all, things seem to be looking up :O! I'll continue to stay vigilante!

--

OK! That's it!