The fairy follows the player and has a few emotes now.
We want the fairy to be a bridge of interactions between the player and the world, she will interact with critters, fish, plants, help you with tasks, and be cute the whole time.
She gets distracted often, and if the player moves she will try to catch up
And if you are wondering if she has collision, the answer is yes
She will also grant you the multi-jump magic by default, later on you will be able to choose which movement magic the Fairy grants you.
Next week we will make the event where you acquire your first fairy, it will be simple, just talk to Tiana, it will start a cutscene and you will get to customize and name the Fairy.
We want to release the first part of the Fairy update in two weeks, you will get a single fairy, the rockstep movement magic and wallrunning. During the following weeks we will keep adding small updates with more Fairy emotes and interactions. After we are satisfied with what a single fairy can do we will work on the part 2 of the fairy update: you will be able to acquire Fairy 2 and 3, and choose from other movement spells, this update will also come with Fairy stats, maybe we will add traits, fairy skills and personalities. The part 3 will be the final and larger part of the update, it will increase the amount of fairies you can have from to 3 to inifinite, you will be able to raise a whole colony of them, give them jobs and even breed them (don't worry it will be SFW, they just magically pop an egg after holding hands for a while).
Friday Progress Report 357
We have finished the system to sync animations on both face and body, as well as hair "equipping" and physics.
We are still working on the hair physics configurations as each hair part needs different values for the tension and inertia for each bone. Also my brother is finishing up configurable particle generators to be called mid animation, so we can add cute particles too.
We are close to having the default faerie ingame now, by next friday we should have it following the player, doing cute animations and emoting. Then we will make the cutomization screen so you can build your Faerie and the intro cutscene where you get her.
This should be done before the end of the month we expect to release Faerie Update part 1 by April 26, we will release an update with the single faerie, then we will start working on the larger faerie colony system with several faeries.
Friday Progress Report 356
Wings, Face and Body animations are working independently on the Faerie body, but we made it so they will be syncronizable through scripts, so we can have idle loops with different durations and have everything sync when needed.
Making custom animations is a pain, for some reason the feet IK refuse to play as the animation was modeled in the editor, so sometimes look slightly different than they should... and other times they just work as intended somehow, animating is so stressful...
There was no progress on movement this week because we are both focused on getting the base Faerie done, soon we will have a cute little faerie following the protagonist ingame, maybe in a week or two.
Then comes the interactions with the Faerie, stuff like Headpats, feeding, ordering her to harvest something, as well as the faerie reacting when you do something or when it spots a shimmering critter or a rare fish, and so on.
Friday Progress Report 355
Good news, the Faerie model is done and the facerig works! We can control the eyes and make smooth facial animations instead of just swapping textures like the current NPC faces, in the future I will upgrade the NPC models so they all can have this level of facial animation.
I am now making several animations for the Faeries, so they have a large variation of reactions and idle animations for different situations, Faeries will not only have personalities, but also moods, they can get angry at you and pout or be excited and dance if you give them something delicious to eat.
My brother took a break from working on movement to make the Faerie eye control script, but before he switched focus he did manage to fix several bugs on the wall running and made it so now you conserve momentum when wall running.
V0.69.0.1
Bugfixes: Fixed many speed issues with the fishing related to the new timekeeping method
New beginnings update
You can now start the game on any day of the year, this looks like a simple change, but took a lot of work to get done. We have also fixed a critical bug that caused problems on long playthroughs, if you have a save on winter of the first year and the problem started to manifest loading that save on this version should fix it.
Each season now has its own soundtrack, with a song for outdoors day, outdoors night, city day and city night, for a total of 12 new songs (spring is still the same). You can also choose the seeds for the randomization of critter/fish spawns, forageables and quests.
Changelog:
*V0.69.0.0 ~ 20.02.2024 ~ Unity 2020.3.46f1
Features: Implemented a day selection screen for new games, so you can start in any season. Implemented a randomseed selection for some random elements ingame. Added 12 new songs
Changes: Added 10k, 35k and 100k survival score achievements. Improved the aligment of some elements in the Collections Screen
Bugfixes: Fixed a bug related to timekeeping. The game should now work consistently for 100 ingame years rather than just one and a half Fixed a small issue in the Building Screen search box Fixed the tutorial guide triggering when typing in input boxes Fixed scarab critters animation Fixed seeds with no traits not showing the score star in the inventory
Friday Progress Report 350
We are finishing our new update, which will allow the player to choose the starting day as well as the randomseeds that define how critters, forage and npc quests are randomized.
And due to popular demand, we have decided to bring back a certain bug as a secret
As well as some other wacky things
To unlock these you have to start a new game and input certain passwords in the random seed part of the menu, each code does something different, any other input will simply work as a normal randomseed.
If you get tired of the silly stuff you will have an option in the settings to disable them and play normally
Also we are changing our priorities a bit for future updates, we might switch focus from exploration and survival to the Faerie system, as we overhauled our plans after getting some inspiration from Palworld.
Friday Progress Report 349
Frederick has been added to the game, he is one of the original founders of Edengrall, but only took a minor part in the town's creation and did not join the founder expedition which led to their disappearance because he has health issues.
He dedicates his life to his research and is quite hard to befriend, but he offers good rewards for quests.
While adding him to the game we were checking which parts of the process are easily moddable and how much work would be needed to add a new character.
Unfortunately everything related to the NPC living quarters, and their responsibilities is hard to mod because it requires modifying the main scene, adding furniture, changing the objects that determine zones and jobs.
So about 85% of the process is easily moddable, but there is a final part that would require messing with the main scene and would cause compatibility issues when modding, we will need to overhaul this eventually when we have some more time.
We are working right now on changing how the game records time to fix a bug that happens in very long games (after winter) and we are adding the ability to choose the starting day and the randomseeds that generate forage and critters.
V0.68.0.0
Features: Added a new NPC Frederick Added an auto save feature
Bugfixes: Adam NPC movement speed is no longer 0, so he can leave his spawn Multi frame operations no longer persist through loading (Tool specials used to affect after load) (this prevents crashes and several other problems)
V0.67.0.0
Features: Added Scholar clothes set for male characters Added new hairstyle
Changes: Player name now only supports spaces and letters Scythe specials now try to follow the terrain You can now jump out if you get stuck in between trellises Adjusted the grass and forage blockers of building pieces
Bugfixes: Fixed numerous null pointers from the bug reports Fixed an UI issue with super tiny and super big resolutions Fixed save/load related grass issues Fixed performance and functionality regarding cutting grass Fixed an visual issue with the recoloring sliders for the character creator
