Josh Bossie

Tag: Beta 2

  • Building a Village, 07/20/2018 – Words Words Words

    Hello Villagers!

    New demo coming July 30th!

    I’ve got big news to share! The next demo of Village Monsters – code name Summer Sherbet – is coming out on July 30th. And for the first time since last year this demo will be made available to everybody!

    I’ve been working my butt off on this release since the end of spring, and it is by far the biggest and best demo yet. I hope you’ll all enjoy this little slice of village life at the end of July!

    Onto the dev log!

    Just Say the Word

    It’s one thing to write a bunch of words. It’s quite another to actually implement them in the game.

    The majority of the past two weeks has been spent adding dialogue to the game and making sure it looks and reads correctly. It’s quite a bit of busy work, but it’s also had benefits as it turns out some lines that seemed fine in my editor didn’t have the same impact when spoken by the villager.

    I’ve done as much editing as I have implementing, and I think that’s a good thing.

    Reading Rainbow

    Speaking of words: bookcases can now be interacted with! Have fun browsing hundreds of titles.

    Foraging

    Foraging has been in the game for a long while now – in fact, it was one of the very first features I created – but it’s always been a silly little placeholder system that wasn’t very interesting. Until now.

    Each season now brings its own thematically appropriate items to forage. Similarly, the items you can find in each part of the world are now different – you can find mushrooms in the forest, seashells on the beach, and vegetables at the farm.

    Foraged items are also far less predictable in where and how often they grow, so you’ll have to do some exploring if you want to make a hobby out of it.

    Camera Woes

    I really, really hate dealing with camera issues. You’re probably thinking, “It’s a 2D game – what camera?”, but when it comes to pixel art you need to make sure you can scale your display without any kind of distortion or weird looking pixels.

    This past week I ran into a doozy of a problem with scaling the UI, but there was a silver lining: the fix ended up solving a whole crop of other bugs. If you’ve experienced UI issues with past releases (such as the dialogue box disappearing, or the clock display getting cut off), then you’ll be happy to know these are now fixed.

    There’s also a very real chance I introduced a host of other camera bugs. I think I must have broken a cursed camera when I was a kid.

    Long Weekend

    Unlike past demos, Summer Sherbet is not unlimited. You have just three days to get to know the village and its surroundings, so make ’em count!

    There’s at least one more dev log coming next week followed by a weighty patch list just prior to release. I’m so pumped for people to play this demo, so I’m going to stop writing these words immediately and get back to work.

  • Building a Village, 07/11/2018 – Invading Privacy

    Hello Villagers!

    Welcome to another (slightly late) weekly developer diary of Village Monsters! 

    Another productive week is under the belt and we’ve had so many of those in a row that our stomach is full to bursting. I let that analogy get away from me, so let’s cover our losses and proceed with the update!

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  • Building a Village, 07/01/2018 – Fishtincts

    Hello Villagers!

    Welcome to another weekly developer diary of Village Monsters. It’s been a productive week over here at Village Monsters HQ. Maybe it’s because my area has escaped the heat that as seemingly conquered the rest of the world. Maybe it’s because my new developer pipeline is really starting to shine.

    Maybe I just had a lot more Red Bull than usual. I don’t rightly know, but I’m sure I shouldn’t question it. Let’s take a peek!

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  • Building a Village, 06/22/2018 – New / Improved

    Hello Villagers!

    It’s a partly sunny / partly cloudy day here at Village Monsters HQ, and it’s perfect weather to reflect back on a productive week of work.

    I’m trying something a bit new this week: instead of a handful of items with detailed explanations I’m going for a lot of items with just a screenshot and blurb about the change. The idea is to make these logs easier to write and more entertaining to read.

    Let’s boogie.

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  • Building a Village 06/15/2018 – New Furnishings

    Happy Summer, villagers!

    The days are getting longer and hotter here at Village Monsters HQ, and that makes it easy to tell I’m a game developer: all I want to do is spend my days inside working on a computer.

    As with previous weeks this is a very dialogue focused update, but I also managed to sneak in some new furniture and decorations, so let’s get to it!

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  • Building a Village – 05/28/2018

    Hello Villagers!

    It’s a long weekend where I live and summer is about to start, though when you work all day in a dark room it’s not as different as you might expect.

    I’ve been busy at work on Village Monster, and I’m excited to talk about what I’ve done in this week’s dev log. Let’s get started!

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  • Building a Village – 05/06/2018

    Hello villagers!

    This Building a Village ​will be a little different than usual. Instead of recapping the past week’s work, I want to do a deep dive on the single most important feature of Village Monsters – its dialogue system!

    Each kind of game values dialogue a little differently, but it’s the real bread-and-butter for a life sims like Village Monsters. Yet despite its importance, it’s often a double-edged sword that can end up doing more harm than good.

    When dialogue start falling apart – getting too repetitious, too predictable, or maybe even too generic – it is often a death sentence for life sims. After all, these are games that value building immersive relationships with NPCs, and there’s no quicker way to ruin that then to feel like you’re talking with a boring robot.

    There are certainly many ways to deal with this problem: some designers prefer having strict control over the script. Others may prefer using “adlib” style conversations to give the illusion of infinite content.

    For Village Monsters I wanted to try something new – and this post will talk about what I’ve done.

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