Previous post: https://subscribestar.adult/posts/2335477
Video: https://youtu.be/7YGlZk7ZGFk

It’s 12th of the month again. Time to talk about what was done in the game.

Most of this I mentioned or showed before, in posts or on discord.

Basic weather system in a form of rain was added into the game. It has a chance to trigger or stop every hour. It includes particle effect that become possible after updating the engine in the previous month.

Rain effect effect made in a way that indoors areas are excluded, plus it has different sound effect depending on if you’re inside or outside.

In the future I want weather to affect NPCs’ behavior. And the fact that the game is now tracking if the player is indoors or outdoors could also be useful for other things.

Most of the time this month I spend teaching NPCs interact with objects in the game world. As a demonstration of what it does you can see in the video how NPCs sit on stools in the tavern or Blacksmith Briena working on her anvil. 

Also a couple of NPC’s can be seen smoking, and previously added “works” like fishing or sweeping floor now uses same code too. So NPCs aren’t hard-coded to do it, they do these actions because of the schedule they were assigned. They think “I’m a blacksmith and that’s my working hours. Hmm.. That’s an anvil over there, I’ll go use it for some time”.

Apart from normal NPCs behavior in the future similar system can be used for something more spicy.

There are still a lot of work on this ahead. For example to make it so NPCs don’t fight over intractable objects when two of them try to use it at same time.

I don’t actually know about how these things are done, I’m figuring stuff out as I go :)

While things above were main focus, apart from that I was working on some smaller things. 

Went over a list of bugs I accumulated over time and were able to fix all of them (apart from one that appears to fix itself with engine update).

Was working on swamp area yesterday, making it look more swamp like, with new shallow water tile-set, waterlilies as ingame objects, reed sprites that are growing from the water. 

Animation on the water tiles will need some tweaking.

Also, a scene with elf femboy got an illustration. I will have to work on how scenes between NPCs will be triggered before it’s added into the game.

Saying “when it’s ready” is fair and makes sense, but it also feels a little disrespectful. I think I will commit and say that the first version should be ready at September 12th. If it’s not completely ready in terms of what I want to see in the first version, I’ll upload what I have. It won’t be content rich version, but you should be able to run around and check out what I’m working on by yourself :)

Previous post: https://subscribestar.adult/posts/2285305
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SfKQZr1QBSY

This month I spend working on two big things.

First one is the quest system I promised to focus on in previous post.

I have successfully basic quest journal. It loads quests from data base, works with save system, saves all the progress, and shows it to the player in GUI.

For testing purposes I added a simple mushroom quest – gather 3 mushrooms and bring them to the quest giver. You can see it in the video.

In terms of future improvement I have this idea about "clues". Those would be some facts about world, some lore knowledge, maybe rumors, that player gathered. Quest objective would be linked to some of the clues. In the situation where player doesn't know how to do an objective because he wasn't reading dialogue and the quest description isn't stating clearly where to go, player can press a button to "think" about the objective and if he has enough related clues gathered he would come up with a solution. For example "I was asked to find three mushrooms, and I heard mushrooms grow in that one forest, maybe I should go there next". Won't be required for the quests, more like fail safe mechanic

Now with basic cutscenes and quests working I can start to work on MC’s intro to the village.

Second big thing I was working on is updating to Godot 4.6

Previously I was working in Godot 3.6, and was hesitant to update. I gave it a try but got a lot of errors I couldn’t find any info about, so I decided to stay with 3.6

This month I was also thinking about how to make rain effect and run into realization that what I want to do won’t be working in 3.6 but should be possible in Godot 4.6, so I gave it another go.

This time I got about 300+ errors and warnings, but none I couldn’t understand. So I spend a week fixing and remaking everything.

Screenshot shows the stage when I was able to make the game running:

Tilemap system got completely remade so I had to recreate all the village and surrounding landscape.

Navigation system broke too, and needed to be remade. As well as many other thing.

Now every single error and warning were fixed and the game is working fully on Godot 4.6 :)

With new tilemap system it was now possible to assign custom metadata to every tile, so I was able to use it for footsteps sounds. Previously after new part of landscape was added I had to paint on separate layer what sound would be playing on what tile, and I don’t need to spend time on it in the future – it will be done automatically. It means development in the future will go slightly faster.

Same thing for NPC navigation – previously I would manually create navigation polygone (area where NPCs can go, so they won’t try to go through walls), but now it will be generated automatically based on the tiles and collisions of the objects that I placed in the world. It again means I won’t have to spend my time on this in the future and development would go faster.

On the screenshot top house has automatically generated navigation, and the bottom one shows old manually created one.

It’s good idea to invest time into things like these now to save time in the future.

Those are two big things I was focused on, but there are a few small things too

Made some simple cobblestone tiles. Should help to add some variety to the look of roads and to footstep sounds

Statue in the local church got an illustration. As is tradition :D

MC got an illustration for his possible first scene. 

Done some with the landscape, added Sheriff’s house and Sheriff / village guard Rhona herself:

She’ll keep these unruly femboys in line.

For the next month I wan to work NPCs behavior. The goal will be to make it so when they come into the tavern they would be able to choose a stool and sit on it. Not because they are programmed but as a random part of their roaming. With that working later I would be able to build on top of it, so NPC would be interacting with objects when they decide to, and maybe trigger scenes too.