Happy Summer! We hope everyone is staying safe a cool as the temps heat up. Here’s what we were up to over the past couple of months.
As we mentioned last update, there was a good chance that finishing the redo of Wynoa would be missed for July, and sure enough we have. That being said – we have redone a good chunk so we’ll show off some screenshots below. Hopefully if you’ve played the demo you’ll be able to spot these areas.
Why it seems like the ocean floor is now visible! Do you spot any trash?
Looks like a certain yard has gotten an upgrade – no white brick walls though.
Well doesn’t this look fancy? Care for a cuppa tea?
Where a house once stood now grows a tree.
I could’ve sworn there was a bridge here?
We’ve made some space for some animals! Wonder what will end up here?
Would you say sleeping on rock is an upgrade from dirt?
Now that we are halfway through the year we’ll outline some changes/next steps for the next few months. We will be temporarily pausing our work on the debates for a little bit to focus on finishing redoing Wynoa, adding Wynoa’s passive animals and the upcoming Gamemaker upgrade. This is so that we can release a demo update later this year, which was one of our main goals. We hope to get that out for September / October. After which we will be focusing on both the debates/content and infrastructure for the game.
We’ve talked about debates and content changes before, but the infrastructure might be some new news.
The team is very small. Very very small. Throughout the years we’ve had a few people temporarily join to help test releases, but as we move towards completion, release, and post-release support the fact that the team is so small and limited in hours becomes a problem: how can we release bug fixes, patches, content, etc. in a timely manner without introducing more problems? How can we check to make sure that the balancing for the economy, exp, health, stats, etc. is fair or fun?
If you recall the other year we did some research and what it comes down to is automation and simulations, which is where the infrastructure focus will live. We will make it such that:
it is easy to generate releases for itch/steam/everywhere else
it is easy to upload builds (if you’ve ever uploaded a build to steam you know what we mean)
we will not have to replay the whole game to verify some key components
we will automatically be able to check for missing translation strings, etc.
we will automatically check for some easy soft lock situations
and so on
Eventually we would like everything to be automated (ex. cutscenes) but that will slowly be built up over time. In the short term, not having to replay the demo for the 100th time would be ideal.
Please.
So with that said, look forward to more tech posts come the new year. In the mean time we will be wrapping up the visual changes for Wynoa, doing some upgrades and hopefully have some good news in September. See you then!