Okay okay, listen, I know I was supposed to be working on clothes and hair. We got a little inspired by a video about the animations of Final fantasy 6 and decided I should do a full round of emotion sprites for the NPCs. We originally had the classic emotion bubbles, but felt like they weren't adding much. We think these are much more fun and will add a lot more to conversations and cutscenes.
These did take a lot longer than I was expecting, but they are finally all done and NOW I will get started on hair and clothes. We decided to do these first since they will also help Coderman with writing.
And now some words from him!
HEY THERE HI THERE HO THERE.
Writing and quest planning continue along apace. Working through the core museum story is still the main focus. There's an amount of complication that comes from trying to plot out these more or less mandatory stories without the supporting side stories, but I'm leaving breadcrumbs sprinkled around to remind us to go do those once the wider town stories get put in.
The current internal debate for me is whether to do all of the museum quests now or stop after this half-way quest so that reactions can be built up to make later game writing a bit more coherent and easy to conceptualize. Knowing what players MIGHT HAVE done is very helpful in conceptualizing how the characters are going to react. But that's all rambling, more or less. The systems are in a good spot. We've got pretty much all the functions we need, so writing can be more and more consistent without a ton of minor shifts over to code a cutscene action every 30 minutes.
Oh! And just for vague reference, since numbers are fun, the current word count of the conversations in the game is just over 80,000 and I'd estimate we're at or below 5% of the total writing. And don't worry! Most of that is in branches people will never see, so you're not going to be inundated with yapping.
New Furniture New Trailer!
Hello future curators!
Art maker here, happy to report I have finished my furniture-drawing task. I just got done adding around 560 housing-related items (indoor/outdoor furniture, wallpapers, and flooring). I think that should be a decent number of items for an early access release, but not nearly enough to be considered complete! Maybe I'll have time to sneak some more in before initial release.
My next major task is probably going to be hairstyles and clothing. We need to have a bare minimum number of those items as well for early access.
Getting this furniture in finally made it so we could cut a new trailer! Although I am notoriously terrible at decorating, we can finally showcase player housing a bit better now. The entire game's art has been updated as well since the first trailer was made, so it just looks way better now overall.
And now some words from Coderman!
Howdy.
Progress has come along really nicely since the last time we did a devlog. The current goal is getting main line museum quests put together and that's coming along well. I've got two of the core four quests done there, including all the cutscenes and branches that go along with them. I'll be getting the other two done and then moving on to fleshing out the town with quests for Fairmoon's fine citizens.
To give a bit of behind the scenes perspective, we were originally going to get just the main quest done and then go on to romance path planning, but it occurred to me that the end result of that was going to be that we would have a bunch of romance stories in an otherwise fairly flat Fairmoon. I didn't really think that would make sense, especially with how involved a lot of the families are going to be in the romances for some characters. I want everything to feel like it interconnects in meaningful ways for the characters and the player and for that to be the case, it would be a bit odd to just have a few characters with these really involved lives that can't really reference any of the general about-town happenings.
So that'll be the story planning thrust for the time being. Museum completion quest stuff, then about-town quests to give you things to do and help flesh out the characters and how they interact with each other and with you. That will also include some other museum side-quest type things. Then it will be a big cleanup on the outstanding UI pieces that need to be finished. That's mostly visual, but we'll get to it. Basically all of the tech is in and stable except little bits here and there for cutscenes or logic checks. I can write without feeling like there's some nagging huge thing I'm forgetting to make.
Beta?! What's next?
Hello future curators!
Small but also big update... we're finally in beta! It feels weird to say, and it also feels like we're forgetting something, but we're finally feature-complete for an Early Access release. We have all the systems in and now we just need to fill them out with content. Coderman has stories to write and music to make and I have a lot of customizables to draw and animate (furniture, clothes, hair, etc.).
Related to that, I did finish all the furniture sets and have moved on to miscellaneous and outdoor items! I will finish those up before moving on to probably clothes.
The next thing we are going to work on is a sound pass (button sounds, ambience, action sounds, etc.). It will be fun to add some more life to the game, but we also may become numb from listening to hundreds of similar sounds for hours on end.
Unrelated picture, just so you have something to look at. I wonder what kinds of sounds dinosaurs used to make...
And now some words from Coderman.
BETA BETA BETA! YEAH! I mean, it's easy enough to write that out, but it still doesn't feel like it, even though we're genuinely moving on to a more content-creation heavy part of development. It does, however, feel like all of our systems are in place and are generally as flexible and robust as we need them to be. That's exciting. There's still plenty of core content to make and polish to apply to UI and animations and all sorts of things, but they are mostly that, creating the content. Not writing or implementing systems. Or, worse, rewriting them. So let's talk a bit about what we ARE doing. Or what I'm doing anyway.
Firstly! Sounds. I'm not going to get everything in for sound right out of the gate, but I will be spending the next little bit adding general ambiance and sound triggers for the stuff that needs it. Then we will get better sounds added in over time. After that, I'll be working on all the Main Story stuff... I guess I'll do a small paragraph on the narrative concept.
So, rather than have things work the way they tend to work in the standard modern RPG (single core branch and choices that still more or less lead to the same outcomes), I'm going to be planning multiple branches and decisions made along the way will put you onto these branching paths, each of which will have their own outcomes and consequences. Getting the core story laid in will let me then tie stuff into that for character stories or side stuff. And making the branches themselves discrete should keep planning and reactions from spiraling out of control at a baseline while allowing for more specificity wherever it's needed.
For now, those are the two main projects for me. We'll see where we land after those and what the plan is for next steps and Early Access plans and whatever else. Onward we go! We're definitely getting closer.
New Year New Dialogue
Hello future curators!
Artmaker here. Since our last update, besides a little holiday time off, we've been doing a lot of bug testing/fixing and implementing some of the remaining features of the game. We also completely replaced our dialogue system, which Coderman will talk about below.
My time has been a bit split between making furniture, bug testing, and helping with the dialogue system change. As far as art goes, I will just be hammering away at furniture pieces until we have a satisfactory number for early access, then I will move on to hair or clothes. I currently have 17 furniture sets planned, of which I've completed 14. This does not include miscellaneous indoor items and outdoor items. Since I haven't gotten to those miscellaneous items yet, showing off the furniture is a bit bare bones, but here are a few random items in the level 1 house!
And now here's Coderman's update!
Exciting times in code town! That is to say, I have basically rebuilt a couples of bits so that things will be more maintainable going forward for the two of us or so that we can scale them without Unity becoming very angry.
So I'll start with the big one: We've switched dialogue systems from Dialogue System for Unity to Yarn. The reason for this was twofold. I was getting weird issues with the Lua system in Unity randomly returning incorrect boolean values for compound comparisons (if something and somethingelse) while the raw C# functions were correct, which was concerning but I assume was my fault. By far the larger reason, however, was that the org-chat/node method of handling Dialogue was not going to be workable for a two-person team.
While I can most certainly write far too many words, editing and managing those words when they're in node format is a problem. That's why I made the Dialogue parser linked in previous devlogs. The problem with that was that, while editing was easy, quick visual inspections of how the dialogue would run weren't super easy and expanding the parser to handle more complex blocks and logic would have just led to reimplementing things that Yarn already does. Likewise, it still wouldn't enable proper sequential scripting since it was still relying on the nodes. This stuff combined with branch/return conditional dialogue being complex to write led to the decision to switch things over. So that took a week or so, with testing, and now we're up and running on Yarn and nothing looks different at all to anyone playing our super secret testing builds, but behind the scenes we'll be able to handle things much better going forward.
Then there's the question of sprites! Previously, I was just loading sprites as needed from the resources file, thinking that wouldn't be too big of a deal, since it was a few hundred very small (32x32) textures, but because Unity seems to want people to suffer if they need to load a large number of individual files (regardless of size) at runtime, the general ways to handle it are either performance killers (Resources.LoadAll) or took a comically long time (Addressables.LoadAsync), so we've moved our spriteswap stuff over to Unity's 2D Animation SpriteLibraryAssets... FOR NOW. I may move those to a custom ScriptableObject later due to Unity's editors for the SpriteLibrary pieces being awful and slow, but it will work the same and we'll cross that bridge if forced to.
We're going to get the rest of the actual features put in (town systems and some housing stuff) and then I believe we will be on to just story planning and writing and making music.
NPC Introductions and Furniture!
Hello future curators!
Art maker here. Since our last update I've been working mostly on furniture and house interior customization, with a little bit of UI on the side to finish up all the pieces we're still missing. My focus has mostly been on walls, floors, kitchens, bathrooms, and different styles of basic furniture pieces like beds, couches, tables, etc. There is still a ton more to do as I haven't stepped too far into miscellaneous household items yet, but we'll get there!
Below are a few examples of how you'll be able to customize your house. My goal is to have a wide variety of styles to hopefully suit most people's tastes.
And now a word from coderman!
INTROS ARE DONE!
That's 35 intros. Our longest one is about 915 lines with 124 player dialogue options. I know that sounds like a lot, but that's about 7 lines per player choice. Obviously it's a lot of work to make a conversation like that but a lot of the time spent was in figuring out the specifics of NPC characterization so I can be faster going forward. Now that I know them all and have dialogue to lean on to make sure I'm keeping them consistent and (hopefully) unique, things should move along smoothly.
But for now, we'll be turning our attention to finishing up some UI pieces and fixing some little bugs that cropped up while I was writing from patching little bits together. Then it'll be testing time for people who aren't us for the first time. A few close friends and trusted confidants. Progress is good though. I'll get things cleaned up. We're going to start getting finalized-ish (we hope) UI put into place. Then, it'll probably be main story planning and writing. I think that's the whole kit. Possibly the caboodle as well. It's gettin' there!
Lights and animals!
Hello future curators!
Art maker here. Since our last update, I set up lighting around the entire game. Now we're lookin' nice and cozy, especially at night and in the museum.
Once I finished that, I got to work on some ambience, like animals and falling leaves. Here are a few examples. There will be more in game!
I also started work on housing furniture, my next task. We will be taking a little break in the next couple of days for some space travel. Once we're back from that, I'll be back to work on furniture.
And now a word from coderman!
Writing continues apace! Not a ton of news there. With certain MAJOR VIDEO GAME RELEASES coming up, I'm happy to have made good progress, though. Nearly done with intro conversations. For a little bit of information, they vary by character but there are a few hundred unique lines per intro conversation, with the largest so far being close to 900 lines of dialogue. Don't worry though! Most of that is because of branching. You're not going to be stuck talking to characters for 9 hours. I'm always mindful of that since nothing makes my eyes glaze quite like conversations that drag on with no point.
I also did some shader work to see if other methods of maintaining a nice look while allowing smooth zooming would look better than our current solution, but they were all more or less the same or worse and most were more expensive computationally. So out they went!
I believe I have three... maybe three intro conversations left. Those will be getting done after our little vacation.
New logo as well. I did the typography and general design concept and ol' Art Pants up there did the pixels. I did most of the design for our Steam assets as well. I think we're in a pretty good spot with it. We'll swing back around and do some more clean up on the Steam page later. Make it look pretty. Gotta cut a new trailer together eventually as well, but we'll get to that a bit later after intro conversations and maybe some testing runs.
Player house exteriors!
Hello future curators!
Art maker here. Since the last update, I've put together some player house exteriors you'll be able to upgrade to. All house styles will have different color options to choose from. Below is a picture of the set I just finished. I will of course be adding even more styles as development continues.
Coderman figured out how to get our lighting looking good, so that's what I'll be working on next.
I guess it's my turn to talk about stuff, so we'll talk about writing and music a little bit this time around, since programming stuff is all very minor. Life has calmed down so progress is speeding back up on the writing, which is good news.
I'm working my way through the intro conversations still, stopping here and there to add little lookup functions and various other bits and bobs that will help us keep track of things and try to make the game as reactive as possible. That's the long-term goal for conversations, even if the intro conversations don't have a ton of things to react to yet. Though, as story planning and quest stuff advances I will probably re-visit the intro conversations and add some extra markers and options as needed.
The DSText format I slapped together has been really good for writing branching stuff. It makes it quick to work with heavily branching text and is really flexible for complex linking. It's up on Github like I mentioned before, and I'll probably try to spread it around a bit more when I get more time to help people who start working with it, if anyone does.
On the music side, I've been thinking about the overall vibe. I'm not working on the music explicitly at the moment, but I try to keep everything in mind while I'm working. With that in mind, I am thinking that rather than go for a very melody-heavy main soundtrack, since you'll be spending a lot of time with the songs, I think it'll be better to go for a more low-key soundtrack. Stuff that augments the cozy feeling instead of drawing attention to itself. Events and holidays and things will likely still have bespoke, melodic songs since it's important for those to have a lot of character, I think. That's all concept stuff right now. I'm using a bit of my free-time to play around with styles to see what feels best.
Clothes and hair and beards!
Hello future curators!
Art maker here. These past few months I've been working on getting a set of starter hairstyles and clothes ready for both the male and female player character. This includes hair, beards, jackets, shirts, pants, and shoes. Considering every hair style/color and every clothing piece, there will be hundreds of possible combinations just for your starter outfit. There will of course be many more items and variants to buy at the tailor!
Below is an example image of a few outfits.
The next major thing I'll be working on is getting some player house exteriors drawn for housing upgrades, along with some furniture, floors, and walls.
We're still alive
Hello future curators!
We just wanted to post a quick update on what we've been working on.
Art person here! I have been continuing to work on the overall visual quality of the game with a focus on visual clarity. The layouts of a couple outdoor areas have changed and the current focus is on the interiors of the buildings. We've experimented with different styles over the years and are now trying to finalize the look of the game. Lighting is a whole other thing we'll be tackling soon, once the interior updates are done.
Here's a little example of a before and after, hopefully better!
Since the last time we did a little update I've managed to get all the main systems work done and more or less bug free enough that the core game stuff can be played without issue. Since finishing that up, I've moved on to writing intro conversations for the characters.
Before I get to that, though, I wanted to make sure I could work in a format that would let me get dialogue done fairly quickly and flexibly. While the asset we're using for dialogue (Dialogue System for Unity) has YarnSpinner integration, it comes it a lot of caveats that I didn't like having to work around so I wrote a custom parser for a Yarn-like format that I'm calling DSText. The importer for it is up on Github along with an extension for VSCode so you get some minor highlighting support. I don't have time to really support it at the moment, but it's functional even for the more complex conversations I'm working with, so look at it and if you find any bugs, hey! Just fix them. And send a pull request
Alright, the story stuff. That's been a slow process owing to this being the first time I've gotten to focus on the characters in a deeper way so I am spending a lot of time thinking through how they're going to act and respond so that I have a good baseline for character voice when I come back around to them for later storylines and interactions. But that said, it's coming along.
I think that's about it for now. Once the intro conversations are done, we'll be moving on to some other bits and pressing forward toward getting testing stuff out to a select few. We may end up going Early Access so that we can get feedback and important bug testing done with a wider group, but that's a discussion for another day.
And hey, if you want to know about that stuff when it comes along, give the game a Wishlist.
Hey! Who wants some progress updates?
It's been a few months since the last dev log, but don't worry. There's a perfectly good reason.
What's the reason? ... ... ...
You should join our Discord. Click Here to do that.
So anyway, we've been working on a lot of things and there's some good news! All of our major systems are done and working. I'll be going over some of that here and talking about what we're moving on to next!
The Stuff That's Done
Shops - Shops are a must have, right? Well, we've got shops. They work! You can buy a bunch of stuff at three different shops. Well, technically speaking, you can buy a very limited set of things, but that'll expand as time moves on.
Museum - There's four wings and the deposit handling is there. You can fill up the museum entirely and that's not nothin'! There's also a fancy system for growing some exotic plants for your museum behind the office and that's all working as well.
Stylist - You can get a hair cut.
Fishing - You can fish! We're still wiggling some balance logic on when and where given fish show up, but all the good fishing stuff people love is there. Scientifically accurate size and weight ranges. A counter for how many times you've missed a fish to taunt you for being a failure. All kinds of stuff.
Player Housing - You can decorate your house and the yard outside. Plenty of room for activities and later we'll get the logic in for having you upgrade your house as well, but we're not 100% sure how we want that system to look just yet (dialogue-based versus a bespoke UI for various choices around the look) but we'll figure that out later!
Fossils - Every day there's something exciting happening at the dig site. For you. Not for Liam. He's bored out of his mind, frankly. But you don't know who Liam is yet, so stop thinking about it.
Tree Choppin' - Gotta get seeds from somewhere. And what better place than in the forest? Well, that's how it works. You're welcome.
Mining - There's money to be made in that mine, I'll tell ya. And it works.
There's probably some other system I'm forgetting, but whatever. You get the gist. The game is basically playable as far as the world and core museum filling loop go. We're going to be doing some small private testing here pretty soon and then it'd be nice to do some wider testing so if you'd like to help out join the discord and you're a lot more likely to get poked for that stuff when it comes up!
The Stuff We're Working On
Less bullet pointy, but writing is starting up and we're going around and doing a visual refresh on a bunch of stuff that was done a few years ago and needs a little bit of love. Likewise, we're doing a bit of retooling on a few maps (Forest and Cliffs) to get them. I'm also working on a new logo that I think looks better.
After we get all that done, we're going to be doing some of the later game systems around house upgrades and town stuff. Then making sure everything is all buttoned up around those and more writing and more outfits and furniture and so on.
We'll probably end up doing Early Access as well so that we can get more help with testing and hopefully get some wider interest in the game since it's pretty quiet so far! But it will definitely have plenty of content before we do that, so don't worry there.
Alright! That's it for now. Please Wishlist and share the game around. It helps a lot.
