This Week in the Forest! #139 (BLFC?) (Patreon)

YO FOLKS~!

Vixel wants to do a big ole recap for those interested/haven't been following along! So without further ado!

10/24 weekly update:

Heya floofs, happy new week! <3 This update, I wanted to zoom out a little and talk about where we've been, where we are now, and where we're going next!

Looking back!

In the last two years, Carrot and I finished Act 2 and the first half of Act 3, added the Dustin dash minigame, and doubled our Gallery size with dates, gossips, and side quests, including Blessing of the Bells, Booty Lineup, and Maverick's Side Hustle, to help get to know the forest critters! We also got Android working about a year ago and have been supporting it ever since!

Carrot's been making huge progress on his 3d learning and has recently been creating monthly animations for us to enjoy! :}}

Behind the scenes I've been steadily rewriting a bunch of problem code that's been making Version 1 of Forest of Love slow and buggy, blocking us from adding new features and delaying us publishing the game on Steam. All the nonlinear content (dates, gossips, side quests) exposed a bunch of design issues that we hadn't anticipated before! :O

Where are we now?

Carrot's been busy with asset creation and game design to prepare us for a big content push into the remaining story Acts 3, 4 and 5! I'm wrapping up the last of the tasks in our Version 2 game rewrite, and I'm super excited to move ahead developing fresh content and features!

TFOL Version 2 is a lot more modular and can handle all the story content we'll be adding next. It'll also give us:

• Smaller build size.
• Smoother performance on desktops, mobile, and Itch.
• The ability to add localization (language translation)
• The ability to add an in-game bug reporting tool.
• We can finally look at preparing the game for Steam!
• We can eventually redesign things like input (like for remappable keys), make our menu screens touch friendly, and add some fancy features like the ability to replay dialogues on demand, skip any dialogue, and track player progress for Steam achievements.

What's next?

Coming up, we're looking at publishing two builds. One will be the Version 2 game rewrite, containing all the Version 1 content and bugfixes, so folks can help us discover any leftover issues!

After that we'll share some new Act 3 story content with a nice new chunk of gameplay, and an animated scene.

Carrot will be traveling near the end of October, so we're looking at publishing the v2 playtest build in early November so we can both be home to support it.

The rest of this month, I'll be diving back into our Act 3 main story content, to pick up where we left off after Melody's photoshoot in Maverick's shop studio. I also have some leftover v2 rewrite cleanup todos to finish up!

I've been way behind in the game dev channels on our Discord, so I'll be catching up in those soon!

Eventually, when there's time, I have some cool game design topics and lessons I learned from the rewrite to share in Patreon/discord/twitter.

I'm now maintaining a "technical debt" todo list and will dedicate some time each month to pay it down, so we don't get stuck having to rewrite a bunch of code in the future! >w<

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Whew, that about covers it for today! Have a nice week, and super grateful to you all for your love and support!! ^w^ <3 <3 <3

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That was a ton! But a good recap for sure, I'll be quick with my updates.

I'm leaving to BLFC from the 29th to the 5th! My birthday is the 3rd so it's gonna be fun time :3 If anyone is going and wants to meet up, shoot me a message on discord or something.

I animated some assets, like the flashy lightning above! A couple other things too, but w/e.

And this month's animation is almost done! It's kinda long, and has a lot going on, so it's been a process, but it's coming out pretty well :> Have a screen shot!

What a mouthful!

OK. That's it from me. I've gotta get this thing wrapped up before the con. Then I won't be here for next week's update, but maybe i'll post something from my ipad.

Take care folks!