Dev Blog #150 - In The Sycamore Trees (Patreon)

Greetings Everyone!

The year is nearly over and with it comes one last update! Let's talk about where we are and where we're going!

Update 5.8 - Sweet Dreams

The end of the year is an interesting time when it comes to development. Enough time for an update, but not a clean character update like we've gotten with Diana and Tasha recently. However, that's what makes it the perfect time for a systems update! This time, among general housekeeping, we'll be bolstering the existing dream system!

Dreams, as they exist in the game, are... fine... They're fine. They work, they're just kind of boring. Not just boring for the players, but clunky on the backend as well. See, right now, dreams are effectively functioning as "memories", which are not the same thing as dreams. When an event occurs in the game, a new "memory" is unlocked during that event and added to the possible dream pool. The big and possibly obvious flaw with this system is that if, say, the first time you go rollerblading with Ava you unlock the associated dream for that. Cool! But now there's, like, 30 different scenes where you might go rollerblading with Ava, and the function to add the dream needs to be in each of those scenes, or there's a chance the dream will never unlock!

That kinda sucks, so we're fixing it!

Hey, Remember Stats?

Actually, this update is a bit of a twofer, because now dream unlocks will be tied directly to character stats. That is, Affection and Corruption for each character. So what makes this a 2-for-1 kind of update? Well, for this to work well also need to finish the implementation of new interactions first introduced in Tasha's update that are also affected by these stats.

To refresh, as you build up characters' Affection and Corruption, the red (Affection) and purple (Corruption) hearts will appear next to character names in dialogue, depending on which stat is higher. This is a visual representation of how you're developing your relationship with a character, as well as a clear way to know if they can be interacted with at all. With each new Tier (full heart) you'll unlock a new micro interaction with that character based on the associated stat. Raising Affection will let you give head pats, cuddle, etc., while Corruption events are a lot less wholesome. Unfortunately, right now these events only apply to Tasha and Penny. Update 5.8 will be adding these events to the rest of the main cast!

Dreams will now work in the same way. Every character you meet will add a new sort of "default" dream, since they now occupy your mind in some way. As you progress your relationships with these characters, every new Affection and Corruption rank will add a new dream for that character into the pool, and these dreams themselves can improve your relationships, since you're thinking about them all the more now!

A Wish Your... Heart? Makes?

Dreams aren't memories.

Dreams are not memories.

DREAMS, AND MEMORIES, AREN'T THE SAME THING.

Thank you all for coming to my Ted Talk, now we can move on. I want to settle this once and for all, and maybe I'm to blame for implementation (see above) so here I am looking to fix it. To everyone, and there have been a lot of you, who've mentioned on Discord or in a bug report that "I'm dreaming about X even though I'm Y now and not X anymore" or something to that extent... This is intentional. In the current version of the game this happens often since dreams are designed to offer experiences that don't necessarily have to make sense, and in honor of me missing the mark on that, we're just gonna go ahead and overcorrect!

As you play the game, you will quickly start to see dreams that involve situations that haven't happened yet, or may never happen at all. Strange and otherworldly situations, or even just "memories" that may or may not even be yours. These scenes are still going to be very short, but the quantity and variety of them is set to explode. In fact, all told, we're looking to add just about 100 new dreams to the game with this update, along with nearly the same number of new micro interactions with these characters.

So that's pretty much all there is to dreams, right?

That's it for this week everyone! Expect dev builds to start showing up next week! As always, thank you all for your continued feedback and support!