Hunger, Thirst & More! (Patreon)

Helloo, Hope you’re doing well!

This week we’ve been working hard on many different fronts, as the number of Wellbeings increases the system gets more complex and more fun! I feel like Little Sim World gets more lively with each update, since because of the Wellbeings we’re now adding interaction to a lot of our furniture and items. So let’s get to it!

🍪 Hunger & Thirst - Inventory system

I’ve started to get the inventory system to work ingame. A quick summary of what your inventory is in Little Sim World, there you can store various items including food, newspapers, drinks, tickets and others. The space is limited to 12 slots but you can store multiple items of the same kind in the same slot.

(Still very WIP, but we are getting there ~ also starting with an inventory of 12 rather than 9!)

Certain items such as food can be slowly consumed over time through multiple uses. Each of these items have a total amount of points they can provide to the player (hunger points for example), and a rate of points per second they can output. After the total points are spent the items are deemed consumed and disappear. Another stat that influences certain items is decay, as food will decay over time if not placed inside a fridge (they will still decay after going into the fridge, just significantly slower). Once decay is complete, the food will turn into rubbish/rot and become non-consumable. Other than that, decay is not related to consumption and these two values do not communicate with each other.

Also, hearing your thoughts on the 'healthy' food tag, we've decided to change 'healthy' to 'organic' instead ~ I hope everyone will be happy with this change :)

💻 Mood - Computer animation

After Hunger and Thirst it’ll be time to implement Mood and Social into Little Sim World. One of the ways you can recover your Mood is of course by gaming!

The next step for these will be adding animations to the computer screens themselves. The biggest challenge with these interactions is coming up with animations that can fit a variety of different shapes for the same type of object. In this case the gaming animation must fit all computers and notebooks we currently have and plan to have in the game. Once the computer gaming animation is done I also want to have a TV watching interaction, and the challenge will be making it fit all of our available couches and chairs!

💁 Wellbeing bar

I know you’ve all seen and had a taste of the wellbeing bars already, but I wanted it to have a more dynamic feel to it, so we’re currently working on some animations that can make them feel more alive. It’s currently WIP but I think you can have an idea of what we’re going for!

(The effects still feel a bit off, as they need to be a bit slower in animation speed and have less complexity but here's a start!)

These are achieved through a shader, as that’s the best way to have a proper dynamic animation that plays within the bar sprite in an optimized way. They already work differently for different recovery speeds, but the look is still too complex when compared to the rest of the game so we’re trying to improve that.

Those are the big things we have been working on, but there have also been a lot of minor updates such as improvements in the pathfinding again (this one has been a struggle). A lot of UI fixes overall as well, etc.

So the next next patch should be in 2 weeks time, with additions and a lot of bug fixes. We are getting close to careers mode and all the wellbeing being complete!

Anyway, that's it for this week and thanks for joining us! (•ө•)♡