It's the spookiest day of the freakiest month of the year (besides tax month), and as always we're working hard on some treats for you all~.

Coming in the next few days... we'll be releasing GROVE: The Halloween TestBuild! It'll be available on itch.io for the low, low price of $0, and available to everyone, subscriber or not!

A short and spooky adventure will soon await you, featuring a couple of devilish foes. Lewd arts, saucy writing, and a sample tray of game mechanics will be available for you to play around with as you please, for as long as you please, and all for free~.

Don't forget to check us out on itch.io here (https://grovedevelopment.itch.io), maybe drop a +Follow so you'll know when the build is ready. We hope you'll give it a try, and share it with your friends too!


Additionally, for those of you who are SuperSponsors, we'll also be releasing a special build here on SubscribeStar with some additional content to get stuck into. We'll make a little update post here when it's ready to go, so stay tuned...!

Whether you'll be playing the normal or special build when they release, thank you for your patience as we get this hot potato of a TestRoom ready to serve...!

More specifically, the technical tricks that have allowed our development and iteration of the GROVE Rework to go much more smoothly than in the past.

We've mentioned once or twice over the course of these DevJournals that one of the reasons behind the GROVE Rework was to get a fresh start of coding, using all the learnings we'd made from our other projects. We hinted at how, behind-the-scenes, the original GROVE was a bit of a mess and caused us quite a few headaches to add content to...

For this month's DevJournal we thought we'd go into a little more detail on these technical aspects, using the Halloween TestRoom as context, so we can show you how we've improved our workflow instead of just saying "trust us, bro".

A big theme of this rework would be 'Organisation' and 'Performance'. One major example can be found in the individual 'Troop' pages, scripting and eventing that dictates how enemies behave and how a battle is to be processed.

In the prior builds of the game, each battle (regardless of enemy) had 9 or more pages that were unique to that individual battle. This led to many situations where bugs / text changes were not reflected across all relevant battles, and made for a generally pretty messy approach to eventing.

With the rework, we aimed to ensure core mechanics were reflected across all battles on the first few pages only, leaving additional pages to hold events unique to that particular battle (ie, text, popup NPC events).

Outside of combat, our eventing list in general has been dramatically cleaned up, with lots of learnings taken from PROWLER in terms of planning, ordering, and minimising 'wasteful' events. You can see for yourself in the numbers just how many events were bloating and bogging down Legacy GROVE.

With the rework, another key focus was on flexibility of parameters. Previously, many systems were fixed in place, simply due to the rigid -- and admittedly patch-work nature of the struggle combat system. It's something that we think set GROVE apart from a lot of other games out there... but the way we went about it in the past was full of experimentation and was certainly NOT optimised.

One key feature we can point to is 'Armour Durability', which previously used a series of 'player states' to determine how many layers they still had in reserve. This meant the maximum durability number was fixed to 4, as there were only 4 player states that dictated player condition: (top stripped, shirt stripped, pants stripped, unders stripped.)

This was decoupled completely in the rework, with Armour Durability now determined by adjustable variables. It'll allow us to be more nuanced with balance, ie: buffing the TP regen of the Scout garbs but having the armour durability cap be at 3, or improving the durability cap of the Knight Plate from 4 to 5 to make it feel like actual extra defence.

Another feature that would have been VERY difficult if not impossible in our previous system, is to now have the various 'lewd grapple stages' of an enemy be represented as a value rather than a series of player statuses. This gives us and the player the ability to 'reverse' out of sex stages if the player has the correct combination of skills, giving us a whole new avenue to play around with in 'Struggle Combat'.

Of course, not all of our learnings come from GROVE alone. There was plenty of useful experience gained from our other two projects we released in the meantime, such as Snake:Byte and Prowler. Some examples are highlighted above with some coding we were able to more or less 'copy-paste' from one project to another, saving a lot of time and code-checking.

Immersive interfaces are a bit of a hobby of ours, with Prowler specifically beginning the love of cool 'slidey panels' and the like. However, the majority of the UI effects were superficial, with the interactive elements relegated to the 'choice boxes', occasionally stretched or moved to the side. 

The Grove Rework gave us an opportunity to properly delve into making more bespoke interfaces, placing interactive elements in more logical locations, whilst still allowing keyboard / controller support! We're really quite proud of our new Docs. Case, an integral part of Grove's explorer kit, and we hope using and navigating through it will be as intuitive as it will be enjoyable!

A common piece of 'feedback' we get about GROVE to this day... is players not necessarily knowing what objects in the world they need to interact with, who to talk to, where to go and find key items. We do try our best to make the game feel both explorative and intuitive... but we know the game inside out, and players obviously don't.
 
And whilst we could go about making things as obvious as we possibly can for people, marking every single interactive element in the world with RPG Maker 'sparklies'... not only does that feel a little lazy, but also feels like it would take away from the sense of exploration that we really want GROVE to embrace as much as possible.

To that end we've added a fancy new 'interaction pip' system, with a variety of different symbols that will show players at a glance just what kind of context sensitive interaction they might have!

From important quest objects and NPCs, to simple flavour text and interactive elements, to objects that have a purpose but are currently non-functional, these little pips will only appear within a certain range (that we can manually adjust), allowing players both the freedom to explore and seek out secrets, flavour text and more... but still know what and where the most important things can be found.

Our goal with this system is to be both useful and unobtrusive, and the upcoming Halloween Test Build will feature it to a small degree, so we'd love to know what you think!


Additionally...

As you may well be aware, movement in GROVE used to be locked to a four-direction, tile-based system. We were able to give people more directional movement in Prowler, but the game still used a grid-based system for interactions and could result in getting stuck on invisible walls or difficulty lining up movement...

For the GROVE Rework we've finally been able to improve both the movement AND the world geometry and tile collision! And this has enabled us to add...

Diagonals!

No longer will the Northern Expanse be a land of right-angles! Diagonal walls and ledges can allow us to tweak areas and pathways, and just generally make the world look that much more natural and interesting. 

These features are small things in the grand scheme of the rework, but we hope you like how they look, and we hope it'll help GROVE feel that much more enjoyable to play, and stand just a little further apart from a 'typical RPG Maker game'.

As always, we'll be eager to hear your thoughts and feedback, and we're so very grateful for your continued support as we work and iterate on the GROVE Rework! 

Happy Halloween, and stay frightful (and vibeful!)
- Regalbuster and SirIzike