Dev Journal: Deep in the Wild

Well, as you might guess from the delay on this one, things have slowed down some since that flurry of activity I reported in the last public journal. I'm still working on building a lot of backend code, mostly pretty abstract stuff, but it's not going as rapidfire as when I first started putting down the very basics.

But that's okay! That's pretty much what I expected. I knew that once I started really trying to get all the details in place to make all these ideas "work," I'd run into a lot of corner cases and odd contradictions I hadn't thought of when I first developed the ideas. That's exactly what prototyping is for! The real question is, can I find elegant solutions that'll stand the test of time, or have I already made choices that'll come back to haunt me later?

Honestly, that's the trickiest part of building any of this: not just making it work right now, but trying to figure out what's the "right" way to build each piece so I won't have to tear it all down and start again later, and then redo everything connected to it besides. It requires a lot of decisions about what the game can or should be like down the road and some guesses about what kind of problems I might still end up running into, so I can minimize the damage if I do have to change things later anyway.

Of course, Project Wild One is already supposed to be an early prototype, and as I mentioned in the new Outline, I'm preparing myself to even call this version an experiment and start fresh with a new version later once I know how things work, but I'm hoping if I do a decent job predicting and heading off problems, that won't be necessary. And even if it is, then it's better to avoid foreseeable problems so I can better see and focus on the ones that surprise me anyway.

Anyway, honestly, I'm still having a lot of fun with it. This sort of thing is also my cup of tea, laying all the groundwork wisely and preparing for the long haul. It feels a lot better than all the worrying and anticipation a few months ago, that's for sure.

Even better, I'm hoping that before long it'll actually start transitioning properly into the "fun stuff" like actually building character attribute modules that can be added to various characters to "enable" special actions or modify how they work. Not too long after that, it should be time to start building some characters themselves! There's still loads to do, honestly, and I haven't gotten as far as I'd hoped, but that means that I've still got a good, open window for getting some suggestions and feedback from you guys!

Out of all my projects so far, this one is definitely the most "flexible," and might be the most so out of just about any of my coming plans and ideas, so this is definitely a good time to open up some healthy discussion, I think. I've just today opened up the topic for discussion on the Discord channel for mid-tier supporters to get suggestions on what kinds of characters I should add to the game. This is partly to get an idea of what folks are interested in and to make sure there aren't any obvious archetypes I forget, and partly just to serve as inspiration, since some ideas might not quite work directly but could spark off something new, or inspire me to alter something I've already got cooking in my head.

Once things have settled in the Discord, I plan to open up a vote as well with a mix of suggestions I got and my own ideas, to see what kinds of characters all of you would like to see in the game! This game will generally have less emphasis on complex, emotional dynamics and conversation and more focus on action of one kind or another, so this will be more about how characters act in intense situations. You'll be playing a sort of "wild" furry traipsing through the home turf of these people or creatures, so how will they react to you? Will they try to engage you in some way, or avoid you? How will they react to how you act? I've got a lot of fun ideas rattling around, but I'm sure you guys can come up with plenty I'd never think of. This may help me figure out what else needs to be possible in the engine, too!

Settings may be pretty varied/flexible, but characters that can "fit" in several different settings would probably be helpful, so I can "reuse" fun/interesting characters between levels or at least find a home for them easily. I'm also expecting to have a healthy range from more "vanilla" to more "extreme" content, with some characters either disappearing or being modified as needed if stuff they'd do is turned off by the player at game start.

So it's a pretty wide open set of possibilities! The main challenge will probably be keeping the characters "simple" so they don't require loads of dialogue or explanation and can react to just about anything the player does reasonably. I'll be looking forward to seeing what folks think! If you're in the tier for joining the discussion, please make sure you're on Discord to talk it over with us!