This Week in the Forest! #106 (Patreon)

Thought I posted this already :x! My bad. Here's what we've been up to this month!

Starting with A word from Vixel!

1/2 weekly update:

Heya floofs! Happy new year! ^w^

Continued working on spawners code last week in the Upgrade project. Also detoured for a couple sessions to ensure chapter select, gossip controls, and the pause menu are rock solid so I have fast access to all our content as I playtest. Hoping to get Carrot the first test build of Act 1 and part of Act 2 later this week, while I keep working on spawners for Acts 2 and 3.

All in all, the rewritten source code is behaving great! Just gotta re-polish all the little things I broke. >.> Once the obvious stuff is fixed, we'll share a test build to help squash any remaining bugs!

See you next week! <3

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On my side I've been up to some PREEEEEETTY exciting things! I mentioned before I was playing Grime, and I got a bit inspired by how they handled the lore and world dev.

WELL. I spend the next few days nailing a buncha TFOL lore :>! Stuff we've loosely planned, but never really had concrete answers for. There was a ton of exploration and questions I found, kinda seemed like I was in an anthropology course or something xD - but this ended up setting the ground rules for a lot of the designs in the stuff that's in Act 4 :>

Since I got a bit more comfortable with where I want things to go visually, (and gameplay-wise) - I was able to come up with a new workflow for the environment. So far, all of TFOL has been entirely hand painted, with a bit of re-using assets. The Act 4 area will be tiled. Sorta. Not like a traditional "square" tile, but cut up in a way that makes things extendable and connectable! The image above kinda illustrates what I'm talking about. Those things were made from copy/pasting.

Now that I have the "master tiles" generally set up, I can paint them, and we should be entirely good to go. Once the general map is designed, I can go back and hand paint extra details to make it all still fit with the hand-painted aesthetic!

The reason this was a necessity, is Act 4 is going to be a bit of a departure of the normal game-play loop. The pacing, tone, and visuals will be quite different. I wanted the gameplay to also reflect this change. I want exploration to be the main focus in act 4, and in order to make something worth exploring, you need a bit of space! Hand painting eeeeeeverything would be super daunting - BUT this new workflow expedites the foundation! 

I'm pretty stoked to see it in action. Hopefully I'll have a solid mock for y'all soon!

OK! That's it from us!

Y'all have a good one, and Happy New Year :>