State of the Game: 2023 in Review (Patreon)

Hey  everyone! Judge Heath here, Ursa is normally the one to write these,  but given the chaos of the last year and the last month in particular,  he’s taking a break to focus on getting the code back on track. In  future, these will be written by our new Project Manager, Onion Volcano.

2023  was a rough year no doubt. Our entire original programming team besides  Ursa left the team for various reasons. Our plans for development were  put on pause while we diverted resources and time towards hiring and  training a new team. By mid-summer, we had Norimoo, Neuropa, and Dofi on  the team, and were making amazing headway with new eyes and fresh ideas  to tackle challenges that came to us.

However, that didn’t stop  things from being rough of course: various real life events, including  Spurple being hospitalized after a car accident (he is expected to make a  full recovery), affected our progress significantly during the past  year. Shortly after, we expanded the Art department to include a new  background and environment artist, Immunity, while Nedo took the reins  of the art department. Together, with Immunity, they started making  massive strides refining the second forest floor and with the revisions  for floors 1-3 of the savannah. And while it didn’t effect our pipeline  nearly as much, we did end up losing Crom from our artists, and Johnny  Law from our writers, while welcoming on Togari as a new writer.

At  the end of the year the team expanded a final time with us hiring first  Rimmo to be our technical artist and asset integrator. With this  hiring, we removed a massive logjam in our art-to-development  implementation pipeline. During this time, we also hired OnionVolcano,  our new Producer and Project Manager, who will be taking over for me now  so that I can step back and focus my efforts more on the game design  side of things.

2023 was rough for us, yes, but we’ve come out of  it wiser, stronger, and better able to handle issues in the future. So  let’s look at what we did accomplish during this year! today’s post is  going to be about looking back on the year of 2023, and giving all of  you an idea of how far we’ve come and what is on the horizon!


Going  department by department, I’ve listed out what has been added to the  game, and you’ll see some pretty fantastic additions when taken as a  whole!

Art

On the art  side of things we massively expanded our work on the dialogue sprites  for various npcs across the map, revised savannah floors 1-3, and gave  Katarina Station an entirely new look to prepare it for its expansion as  a quest hub!

Natsu Dialogue Portrait
Tex Dialogue Portrait
Gail Dialogue Portrait
Bang Expressions
Katarina Station Rework
Savannah Floor 1 Rework
Forest Floor 1 Interior Sample
Forest Floor 2 Holstaur Village Fountain

• Dialogue Sprites
  • Work on full body dialogue sprites
  • Work on expressions
• Dungeon and Floor Content
  • Forest Floor 1 and 2 work
  • Savannah Floor 1-3 Redux Work
  • Tro’s Lab
  • Katarina Station
    

Programming

Programming  has had the most tumultuous year of the various departments, having to  go through so much change and transition. However, they still covered  incredible ground despite the challenges involved.  While not easily  summarized, here is a list of notable additions and work completed!

Video: Unity Structure Time-Lapse: 2016-2023
Video: Migration System
Video: Fast Travel System
Level Up UI and Skill Points
New Farm Job Board Systems
More Town Dialogue Points Implementation
Enemy Wolf Combat Implementation
Preliminary Quest Refactor Work

• Major
  • Fairgrounds & Brownie Caravan event, sex scenes
  • Magical saturation system
  • New enemy wolf units
  • New enemy holstaur units
  • Combat Ability skill ranks
  • Dungeon Fast Travel
  • Katarina Station visual overhaul + preparing for quest hub
  • Monster migration system
  • New enemy pirate units
• Minor
  • Stackable equipment
  • New farm action icons
  • Camellia & Jaero combat balancing
  • Numerous fixes to keybinding, NPC interactions, farming, UI, combat, sprites/outlines
  • Calendar & events system reworked
  • New Cave environment music varieties
  • Enemy combat mob balancing
  • Performance & memory improvements for dungeons, town scenes, town events
  • 64-Bit Version of the game made available.
    

Animation

Of  all our departments, the Animation department has had the smoothest  sailing; managing to get far ahead of their set milestones. The  groundwork was laid for more HD Sex Scenes, as well as various world  sprite animations (including those found in the Brownie Caravan.)

Video: Jam Dance
Ev Sleeping Animations
Garm Combat Animations
Cerise Combat Idle

• Minerva HD Content
• Sieger HD Content
• Orchid HD Content
• Kellam HD Content
• Lots of Combat and HD Animation Fixes to make them run smoother and nicer such as the Market Day Stalls
• Travel System Animations
• Town idle assets for various characters.
• Ev Sleeping Animations for different places:
• Dungeon and Combat Assets for Forest Floor and other areas
• Tro’s Lab Animations

Writing

On  the writing side of things we’ve seen enormous improvement across the  board. The writing team expanded the number of written sex scenes and  sprite sex animations that lacked a written component. Entirely new  characters were penned, and several events and story segments were  completed. In addition multiple areas of the content have been written  out and are awaiting implementation currently

Video: Story Arc 2 Intro Preview (SPOILERS!) 

• Completed and Implemented
  • Brownie Caravan Update: The Writing team completed the Brownie Caravan update, introducing several new characters, eight major sex scenes and a number of minor sex scenes. We are confident that this major content update will provide a number of fun interactions for players to take a break during their busy schedule of farming and fighting.
• Completed and in the process of being implemented
  • Arc 2 Opening
  • Kiram Recruitment
  • Forest Isle Content for floors 1 and 2
  • Various Romance and Date Dialogues. 
  • Various sex scene written segments
    

At  the end of last year S-Purple had a serious accident resulting in his  hospitalization, while he is expected to make a full recovery, it still  left us in a lurch with our plans, which was to focus on finishing off  Forest Floors 2 and 3 and continue implementation. As Forest Floor 2 was  only partially complete, and Floor 3 only designed, there was no  question we needed to change priorities on our roadmap.

Much of  January has been spent reorganizing the team (to integrate new  leadership and staff), and get early planning and revisions done to  continue forging ahead.

While the full extent of changes will be  announced at a later date, for the time being our plans are to focus on  the scenarios and backend systems which are nearly asset complete. We  look forward to sharing more details for revamps of Tro’s lab, and  Savannah Floors 1-3. After the new development team has cut their teeth  on these revamps, we plan to dive headfirst into continuing the  development of content for the forest isles, Companion social links, and  more!

Below you’ll find a full list of our future plans along with some samples of the work already done for them!

Teaser: Vaskin's Lair
Teaser Video: Captain Kiram's Mechanic
Teaser Video: New Quest System and UI
Teaser: Wreckage in Tro's Lab Redux

• Focus on revising the Savannah floors 1-3 to make them more engaging and better able to onboard new players
• New Quest system and greatly expanded quest content, making the floors  more alive, and less a simple pretty painting you walk through.
• Tutorialization of basic game concepts such as farming, breeding, and cooking.
• Back End Improvements  and new UI for the Quest System.
• Kiram NPC Combat unit
• Story Arc II intro sequences
• Inventory UI performance improvements
• Sex scene unlock hints system
• Quest system overhaul + preparing for quest hub
• Tro's Lab overhaul
• UI & combat sound FX
• NPC Barks both for normal NPCs and party members
• Companion Social Links

If you have any questions we are always readily available in the following places:

• Introduce yourself, discuss the game or send bug reports directly under the eyes of developers - in our very own Discord [ https://discord.gg/cloudmeadow ]
• Drop in on our Livestream where Artists, animators & programmers work daily on Piczel [ https://piczel.tv/watch/Spurple ]