Joshua Bossie

The driftwood will remind him about eternity

  • Feature Friday on a Tuesday: Relationships

    Welcome to another edition of Feature Friday! Yes, I know it’s Tuesday, but “Teacher Tuesday” doesn’t have the same ring to it. Yet again we’re taking a deep dive into one of the many features and systems you can find in Village Monsters

    I unfortunately had to skip last Friday due to putting out my latest demo – thus the delay to Tuesday! – and to celebrate Valentine’s Day I want to dig into the relationship system

    Sorry, buddy, but the answer is “No”. I’m not talking about that kind of relationship.

    Village Monsters is filled with a variety of strange and personable monsters – and even some animated inanimate objects, like Signey here.

    But you cannot date them.

    When I say “relationship” I’m talking purely platonic. Let’s take a look.

    Relationships

    Each day brings something new in Village Monsters, but soon enough you’ll establish a routine: talking to villagers, solving mysteries, participating in events, completing your collection, and much more.

    Nearly every action and activity helps build your relationship with the villagers you find yourself living with. Villagers that view you with distrust or suspicion will slowly thaw over time as you prove yourself to be a respectable member of monster society.

    One important thing to note is that growing relationships is almost entirely passive. There is no “gift” system, at least not like you’d find in Harvest Moon or Stardew Valley.

    I never want relationship building to feel like a chore, and have purposefully made it so that merely experiencing the game is enough to raise your relationships and status.

    Benefits of Good Relations

    You’ll probably want to be friends with everyone just because that’s what you do in video games, but there’ll be some tangible benefits as well

    Story

    There are generally two types of stories in Village Monsters – Personal Stories that each villager goes through, and the main story that you’ll slowly unravel through the course of the game.

    Building relationships will be the primary way to advance both types of stories. You’ll develop both trust and reputation with the villagers, and in doing so you’ll be able to explore both their personal lives and the world they live in.

    Don’t worry, though, there’s no risk of missing anything if you want to experience village life slowly. The story can go at a pace you feel comfortable with – building your relationships merely unlock the opportunities to advance it.

    Exploring Buddies

    There’s an entire part of the game that I’ve been pretty quiet on so far, and unfortunately for you I’m going to continue to keep my lips sealed.

    But I will say this: there’s a lot to explore outside the village. You may just be looking to complete your critter collection or find some treasure, but they’ll be plenty of story reasons to go out and adventure.

    If your relationship is high enough with some villagers they may even offer to come along with you. In fact, these villagers will often have special abilities or insight that helps you explore, collect, and unlock special shortcuts.

    Activities, Items and More

    Beyond story and adventure, building friends also has a more practical side – you’ll get gifts! Some villagers may be holding onto exclusive furniture or powerful items that they’ll only entrust to their close friends. Others may have an idea for a new activity or diversion that they’ll consider with your support.

    This area especially will need to evolve over time as the game is developed, so I’ll have more to say on it later.

    Tracking Relationships

    The Bomber’s Notebook, from LoZ: Majora’s Mask 3D

    While the final amount of villagers is still in flux, I can tell you that this isn’t going to be a small village – you’ll be looking at anywhere between 25 and 40 monster friends to live with. You’re going to need a way to keep track of this all, but how?

    The answer is by keeping careful watch of your handy Compendium. What’s that, you ask? Well, it’s such a big subject that I’ll need to save it for a future Feature Friday, but I can share some ideas with you now.

    Do you remember the Bomber’s Notebook from Majora’s Mask? This handy book served as the primary way to track every townsperson in Clock Town and included their schedule, quest status, and more.

    The Compendium will serve a very similar role in Village Monsters, and it’ll also be the primary way you can track your relationships.

    One thing I really enjoyed about the Bomber’s Notebook is how it evolved over time – nothing was filled out for you, and instead you had to do the legwork to learn people’s schedules and problems.

    Look forward to learning more soon!

  • Sprint 5 – Warming Up – Plan

    The Runnin’ Postman in LoZ: Twilight Princess

    WARMING UP

    Week of February 12th, 2017

    WARP DOGS’ CORP LOGS

    • The state of our WARP CORP continues to hold steady at ~really god damned good~
    • The Extinction-Level-Event (ELE) is now ~50 weeks away. Remarkable!

    Longtime readers of the site may be confused as to how the ELE isgrowing instead of shrinking. We all know that I employ a huge team of highly-respected accountants, but shouldn’t the day I run out of money be getting closer instead of further away…?

    The answer is that I’m actually spending far less than the estimates I made months ago. That was pretty intentional – overestimate spending and underestimate income and all that – but it’s pretty cool to see play out

    Once upon a time I thought I’d be lucky to save up 3 months worth of salary to keep going. Now I’m looking at timelines longer than a year. Pretty crazy! But good! Crazy good!

    Gonna keep this post pretty short this week as I’m late putting this up and I got stuff to do!

    SPRINT GOALS

    After a successful release of my 2nd demo I have a lot of feedback to churn through. In general, this week I hope to start putting levels of polish on the various systems in the game, including coming up with the concept of weeks, months, and even years and seasons.

    Past that, it’s soon time to start exploring screens beyond the initial test area. Maybe even the village itself can start growing with time…we’ll have to see!

    Let’s do our best this week.

  • Sprint 4 – Snowed In – Retrospective

    The wonderfully cozy house of Papyrus, from the equally wonderful Undertale

    SNOWED IN

    Week of February 5th, 2017

    OVERVIEW

    It’s always going to be a good week when I put out a new demo. February’s Were-Release went up on Friday and I’m psyched out of my mind.

    I cannot stress enough how motivational these releases are. Just the feeling of getting something out there is just so satisfying.

    I’ll repeat the same warning I lay out in that post: it’s early – perhaps too early – and rough. But again, if you want to see what incremental and iterative game development is like, or if you want to provide feedback, then I’d love for you to take a look.

    It’s now been a month since I quit my job. Has it been all worth it? Good god, absolutely. I have genuinely never been happier or more satisfied in my life.

    I cannot say how long these good vibes will last. How will I feel when my savings start to dwindle, or if I face some unforeseen hardship? I hope I can face it with the same level of optimism and determination I have going for me now. We’ll see.

    HIGHLIGHTS

    • Release a new demo, one that I’m actually proud of!
    • Already had a chance to implement some feedback from my demo, including some bug fixes, animation cleanup, dialog changes, and more
    • Re-did my product map to more readable and analyzed
    • Added a neato dynamic camera
    • Completely revamped the dog to actually be usable
    • Added a crate, grabbing, and pulling
    • Made weather based off of a ‘forecast’ instead of hardcoded
    • Added idle chatter once dialog is exhausted
    • Fixed weather transitions
    • Whole buncha optimizations

    LOWLIGHTS

    • Made a huge blunder by chasing some dumb optimization down a rabbit hole for 8 hours, only to roll it back when my new code was just as terrible and twice as unreadable
      • Lesson learned…?
    • As always, could have done more 🙁
    • Wish the demo had a bit more stuff to do in it. Next time, though…it’ll be different

    SHOW & TELL

  • Were-Release #2 Out Now – “Snow”

    Image courtesy of Pixabay

    Happy full moon, everybody!

    A new full moon means a new version of Village Monsters for you to explore. I’m happy to announce that the latest Were-Release (what is this?), code named “Snow“, is now officially released.

    I’m very proud of what I can share with you today, but I also want to stress that this is still very early. It’s not exactly brimming with content quite yet!

    Still, if you’re interested in following games in early development, and you want to provide feedback to shape a game in the making, then please take a look!

    “Snow”

    RELEASED: February 10th, 2017

    Download: Windows | Mac (Soon!) | Linux (Soon!)

    What’s New

    Player & Actions

    • Basic character movement (WASD)
      • Includes sprinting (hold Shift), creeping (hold Control)
      • Press the Middle Mouse button to move the camera around
    • Dynamic Camera
      • Follows the player and slightly lags behind
      • Use the middle-mouse button to move it around
      • “Shaky Cam” system implement for some actions
    • Player Action – Talk
      • Get near a villager and use the key to talk to them. X also advances the text
    • Player Action – Interact
      • Currently the only object to interact with is Dragon’s Hoard, the claw machine in the building with Mock
      • Use the X key to interact with it
    • Player Action – Grab / Pull
      • Currently can only grab/pull a box.
      • Use the key when near a box to grab it
    • Player Action – Swing Net
      • Press to swing your net
      • Critters caught by your net are added to your inventory
    • Player Action – Throw
      • Press F to throw the ball
      • Requires to pick up the Dog Ball and make it active

    Villagers, Dog & Other Critters

    • Two new Villagers
      • Mock, the depressed goblin
      • Sign”, the unnamed – but still angry – Sign
    • A more complete Dog
      • Dog snoozes when bored
      • Dog wags its tail faster when ball is picked up
      • Dog fetches ball and brings it back
        • To play fetch, first pick up a ball, make it active, and then throw it with F
      • Dog can be pet and spoken to with X
    • New Critters to catch
      • Half Hopper
        • Flee when you approach
      • Sea Fly
        • Spawn indefinitely near pool
        • Chase after the player when close
      • Candy Horn Beetle
      • Holiday Horn Beetle
        • Winter only
    • Initial pass at “ambiant critters” system
      • A occasional bird will fly across the screen

    Menus & UI

    • Basic dialog system
      • Typerwriter text and tap noise
      • Different types of text
        • Dialog
        • Narrator
        • Emphasis
      • Portrait & animation
    • Basic inventory system
      • Press I or click the bag icon to bring it up
      • Use your mouse or arrow keys to navigate items
      • The F key allows you the currently active icon. Not all items may be used at this time
    • Basic world map menu
      • Press the map icon to bring it up.
      • Use your WASD keys and mouse wheel to navigate.
    • Notification system
      • Notices trigger for various important events, such as inventory management, day changes, and more
      • Like-notices are grouped together

    Simulation & Systems

    • Two new major systems: Time & Weather
      • 8 times of day with their own daylight filters
      • A full day takes about 20 minutes, but there are ways to increase this in the demo
      • 4 weather patterns:
        • Clear
        • Drizzle
        • Heavy Rain
        • Snow
      • A clock UI element to monitor the time and weather
    • Prototype of a 3rd major simulated system – Seasons
      • “Winter” version of map with new visuals, new critters to catch, and new weather
      • Find a way to trigger Winter via an in-game mechanic

    Village & Related

    • Completely new and revamped art style and layout of “village”
      • New trees, flowers, and other vegetation
      • Can no longer walk out of bounds
    • Two new buildings
      • Test inn. Contains Mock, Dragon’s Hoard, and some tables
      • Historical Society. Contains naught but spider webs
    • Dragon’s Hoard claw machine
      • Incredibly basic and buggy!

    Other

    • Basic SFX
      • Wind noises
      • Footfalls
      • Dialog sounds
      • Pickup sound

    Known Issues

    • The player always resets position when changing ‘rooms’
    • Very little is persisted
    • Huge amount of graphical bugs, especially incorrect overlapping and sprite flipping
    • Collision system is frequently dumb
    • Overall, it’s very fragile!

    Feedback

    There are many ways to provide feedback on your time with the game. All feedback will be read and considered – it’s my favorite part of this whole thing!

    Email: josh@warpdogs.com

    Comments: Click here. No registration required.

    Twitter: @WarpDogs

    Other: Scream loudly into the western sun. Let the ground shake with your fury, your blood hot with the magma of the earth.

  • What is – and isn’t – a Were-Release?

    In a few days I’ll be releasing the next Were-Release for my project. This’ll only be my 2nd time doing so, and I think I had just one follower (myself) for the 1st release, so I wanted to take the time to explain about what you can – and can’t – expect out of this.

    In short, a Were-Release is a very early demo of Village Monsters that is released on a monthly basis (the day of the full moon – thus the name!)

    Each Were-Release serves as a snapshot of what the in-development game looks like at that particular point in time. Because it’s based on an arbitrary date, no extraneous work goes into these demos – you won’t find any misleading vertical slices, scripted demos, or any other type of smoke & mirrors.

    Instead, I take the latest stable build I tested and upload it to my site. This allows players who love to watch the evolution of a game’s development experience Village Monsters and provide feedback without a lot of wasted work on my side.

    It’s important to note that a Were-Release is not considered a ‘ship-able product’. You’ll never need to pay or sign up for anything to receive it, but it’s going to be rough, buggy, and things will frequently change from build to build.

    From a feature, visual, and overall ‘feel’ standpoint, each Were-Release version is indicative of the final game: everything you encounter or experience will in the final game in some form.

    However, please do not use these releases to gauge the quality of the final game. I frequently do a lot of experimentation, and certain elements may be bad or plain broken at times. This in no way reflects what you’ll see in the final release.

    I hope as many people as possible can play these early demos, as there’s something really special about seeing a game spring to life over time. However, I also completely understand that some people simply want to wait for a more stable, more polished game – if so, please consider waiting for a different type of release later this year!

    Above all, these releases are meant for feedback. All bugs, feature requests, complaints, and everything else will be read by me and added to the backlog for analysis. I’ll monitor comments and my email address for feedback. You can also catch me on Twitter at @WarpDogs

  • The Village of ???

    Did some “worldbuilding” last night, this time fleshing out the village of…uh, unnamed, I guess.

    This part has been without a doubt my favorite.

    Names in bold are mostly final, whereas the unnamed villagers get just a short blurb describing their general idea.

    There’s a lot of them – probably too many. They aren’t all major, and I could afford to make 2-3 cuts to bring it down if needed, but I’m pretty happy with how this looks currently and will be sticking with it for now.

  • Sprint 4 – Snowed In – Plan

    The wonderfully cozy house of Papyrus, from the equally wonderful Undertale

    SNOWED IN

    Week of February 5th, 2017

    WARP DOGS’ CORP LOGS

    • The state of our WARP CORP continues to hold steady at ~really god damned good~
    • The Extinction-Level-Event (ELE) is now ~46 weeks away. Remarkable!

    An errant Comcast payment aside, this was another good week. All my planning and saving is apparently paying off, which is good! Maybe I wasn’t so crazy after all.

    Maybe.

    The end of this week marks the ~1 month mark since I started this venture. At first time went by slowly, but now it’s barreling down the highway as things settle in. There’s a long way to go until I reach the end of wherever this thing is taking me, but it sure feels closer now than it ever has.

    SPRINT GOALS

    Last sprint may have been the first one where I actually laid out what I hoped to achieve and – by god! – I actually did it! Let’s see if I can continue building on that success, however brief.

    A new were-release is out this Friday, and for me that’s going to serve as a great motivator for focusing on tangible content. Last week was great, but it was very technical and very refactor-heavy – it’s fun to work on behind-the-scenes stuff, but it’s only fun for me, not for players.

    Here are some goals that I think are achievable and provide some good bang vs. buck for the upcoming release…

    • Focus on UI elements, especially related to calendars and menus
    • Create little ‘proof of concepts’ of seasonal changes
    • Add the 1st draft run of Overflow, a central location that will be visited throughout the game

    Look forward to a new version to play with by Friday. Who knows – I might deliver you an actual game! Wow!