This Week in the Forest #136 (Patreon)

AYO~! Here's what we've been up toooo!

Starting with a Word from Vixel!

9/26 weekly update:

Hey floofs! <3

Back from a difficult trip to visit family and help get some medical stuff sorted for my dad! Last week I worked hard on the backlog of TFOL v2 playtesting todos and knocked out all our toughest ones!

I've been tackling high-effort and high-priority tasks first so any major code changes can happen as early as possible. This gives us the lowest chance of introducing new bugs later when finishing the smaller todos.

For task tracking, I've been experimenting with a service called Codecks, which is kind of like Trello except it playfully gamifies tasks into Cards and Decks, like a deckbuilding game. Codecks is still under development and there are a few rough edges, but it's been a useful tool to help me stay organized and measure progress. :}

If you're curious, you can have a peek at our v2 Codecks here! The cards you see in the "v2 Pre-Alpha Bugs and Todos" deck are the ones I'm working on this week. That's all the known remaining work for our v2 alpha build!

https://open.codecks.io/theforestoflove

There's a lot of cards left, but knocking them out should go pretty fast since I focused on the tricky ones first! When I'm done finishing these tasks, Carrot and I will collaboratively playtest a final pre-alpha build. Overall, TFOL v2 is feeling really stable and looks to be a great launching pad for finishing the rest of our story Acts and content. I'm impatient to finally get back to main story stuff! >:O

Boop you soon! <3

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On my end I've been hopping around doing some odds and ends.

First and foremost is finishing up this month's animation! Lots of rendering, and tweaking stuff, and experimenting. Probably a bit too much tbh lol. But it should be worth it! I'll be posting the animations after this update, so keep an eye out! I made audio versions too! It's spicey~

Then I've been doing a lot of writing for act 3. Just finishing up the last lil bits and making everything solid. We have a lot of moments for extra dialogue if the player goes looking for it, it's been fun fleshing them out! I love when a game does these lil' details on unique gameplay moments. Should be fun!

Asset-wise I've also been making progress on smaller random assets that we need for various things.

We're gonna be late again on the build, I know Vixel's been making great progress, but I think he wants to nail out more stuff before having y'all test out the 2.0 build. 

Regarding the bug tools up there, we've been looking at what's going to make the most sense to integrate in our game for y'all. It's between this Codecks or Trello, they both have discord support, unity add-ons, front-facing visuals. I thiiiiink Trello is pulling ahead, but hopefully we'll have a nifty-in-game bug report system once the 2.0 build is ready for y'all to test!

OK THAT'S IT! We'll see ya guys next week!