Dev Journal: Two's Company

Bit of an interesting mixture of news for this one. In my last dev journal, I mentioned I was working on tooltips, and those have come together well at this point I think. I'm hoping they'll serve as solid continuous educational tools for players, and still blend into the background when they're not needed anymore-- I'm hoping to keep most any important information a player needs once they understand how everything works elsewhere. Hopefully down the road, I'll even be able to add support for tooltips activated by text specifically, so I can do things like compress information readouts and still let players get more info on things like character traits when they need it. I'll have to make sure that stays intuitive to use, though.

That's the tough part with this game's design all across the board, as I've mentioned. It's a complicated system behind the scenes, and a lot of it is meant to "make sense" if you apply common (furry porn-style) sense to the situation, but sometimes it may go against the assumptions other games will have you making, and sometimes it follows the world's own logic more than any logic you're used to. It feels sloppy to have so much text and information everywhere, maybe even overwhelming, but I want to make sure players can understand just how much their choices matter. Maybe I'll have to include some kind of checkbox for switching between a "simple" and "advanced" mode or something, where a lot of the text is reduced to just let the player feel things out, vs. explaining what everything actually means and does. Hmm.

And this update's big feature may make things even more overwhelming. I've been working steadily on making multiple NPCs in an encounter possible, and it's coming along fairly well. I finally got to the point most of the pieces were in place for it to at least be possible, and after a couple tests, I tried ramping up to about 20 NPCs at once. The game lagged when all their turns came up at the same time, but it didn't pop a single error, so that seems very promising.

Technically if I had to, I might almost be able to push v0.02 out right now. There are still some odd bugs to chase down, and the text outputs still need fixing and expanding to know how to talk about these characters interacting with each other rather than with you, but the biggest thing left for the absolute minimum would be to build the system for how to actually encounter a second (or further) NPC after the first. Should your actions influence how likely it is, like if you're more or less noisy? An action to try and draw others into the encounter would certainly help.

But that blurs into one of the big "non-essential" additions I'd like to get into this release: options and actions for dealing with crowds. Stuff like drawing others in, mass actions like refusing or inviting everyone here to do X with you, and options for how to escape when a very large crowd may make it exceedingly hard to leave normally. That in turn underlines the need for a menu focused on "self-targeted actions," where stuff like Wait really belongs as well.

It'd also be cool to have some basic NPC logic baked in for crowds, like some preferring to be alone with you or not and either leaving or inviting others accordingly. A system for spawning NPCs in groups to begin with, or even letting you find multiple NPCs that are mid-encounter would be cool too. Building relationships is a developing subtheme in this game, and I think it can help the NPCs feel more real if it's clear they don't only meet when you're around, and they all can develop relationships with each other as well as with you. To what extent I might want to have hidden interactions going on all the time in the background, I'm not sure, but I think if I could make that work well it could be pretty dang interesting. Usually you encounter NPCs that are already a little tired and/or wounded to imply they're fresh out of some other encounter or something, but it would certainly be one step better if you can catch them with clear evidence of a recent meeting, or even still in the act.

Hmm. This isn't entirely on topic, but I do sometimes cover events in my life when they have an impact on my work, and I have to admit, this has been changing up my schedule. My personal life has taken a significant turn for the better recently, and while that's meant I've been a lot less susceptible to depression, motivation failure, and burnout, I've also had a harder time focusing and I seem to have less time in my day than I used to. With the holidays coming up in particular it's going to be really hard to get as many hours in as I'd like on this, so it's something of a relief that we're nearing a playable version. I'm still adapting to all the changes and I'm hoping I can find a healthy balance, and just "get used to it" in general so I can focus more reliably, but right now I'm basically hoping I can cram in a decent chunk of the above features and, ideally, have the project in my proofers' hands before the end of the month. If I'm really lucky I like to think it might be out to supporters before then too, but I'm not holding my breath on that.

Well. Suffice to say, Project Wild One v0.02 is on the way, so if you're a supporter in one of the upper tiers, make sure you've put in your data for any custom content having your name in the game or in the credits! I feel like the monster names we added to the mix saw a lot of pretty prominent exposure, I hope folks have been enjoying the opportunity to be one of the strange creatures confused players run into in those dark woods.

I think that's all the news for now. Thanks for reading! I hope your holidays go well and are stress free!