Development Diary: Shacks, Weather, and a New Exhibit

Here’s last week’s screenshot roundup!

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By far the biggest thing I worked on last week was furniture and other decorations. The above gif is from the same house – your very first one, which is nothing more than a storage shed – that’s being furnished over time.

The final release will have a *lot* of furniture and will run the gamut between the modern – like TVs and fridges – to the more fantastical and unusual

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Work also continues on making the village itself more visually distinct. I’ve added two types of fences – normal brown and the classic white picket – and also fleshed out some more gardens. You’ll be able to customize your own garden that’s outside your home

If you’ve played the current alpha you’ll know that the historical society is pretty desolate – it’s basically just a single room with a bunch of pedestals to place your stuff on.

Last week I iterated over it again and started adding actual exhibits. There are currently two – one for your critter collection, the other for fossil, treasure, and other archaeology donations

Finally I want to talk about weather. I love love LOVE weather in video games, but one thing has always bugged me – even when a game does have weather it often is very same-y…maybe it’ll have just a single ‘rain’ effect, or when it is raining it rains for the entire level or day, that kind of thing. Weather is too interesting and diverse to be this boring!

The above gif shows off 4 different intensities of rain – drizzle, rain, heavy rain, and thunderstorm – that you can experience in Village Monsters. The latter two even come up darker lighting!

Each day will have 8 ‘slots’ for weather, so like real life a single day can have multiple weather changes, and it’ll even try to that make ‘sense’. For example, there’s a weather pattern that starts out with fog in the morning, then cloudy and burning off into sun in the afternoon, then back to clouds and drizzle at night – for anyone on the west coast of the US that should sound pretty familiar!

But beyond differing intensities I want to also have more uncommon “weather” effects, and to do this I’m expanding my definition of ‘weather’ to mean any effects in the air and sky.

In the above you can see two such unusual weather types – flower petals that’ll occur in the spring, and tree pollen which falls in the spring and summer.

In total there are 19 weather effects ranging from sunny and overcast to meteor showers and aurora borealis, and they’ll differ from season to season, and even by time of day. A major design goal in Village Monsters is to have each day feel different and unique, and weather is a big way I’m accomplishing this