Hello everyone!
I hope you've had a great summer so far! I was able to tear myself away from my desk for a week to enjoy the sun in Italy (which was lovely) and now I'm back to it. So much has been happening on the game this past while that it's quite a writeup 😅
Let's go take a look! ^^
🌲 Bark Burg 🌲
as part of the Wholesome Direct we showed of the first of the new areas; Bark Burg!
⭐Welcome to Bark Burg⭐, the busy center of activity in the Grove where multiple critters have taken up residence. This has resulted in some neighborly problems you might be caught in the middle of!
The dense trees house plenty of houses all connected by a network of hanging bridges, mushroom platforms and tricky swings to jump across. In order to deliver all your letters you're going to have to figure out ways to travel vertically and get up those trees!
As you probably know, the game is a tiny open world with 8 distinct areas. Each area has it's own vibe, inhabitants and trinkets to collect.
every area starts with a map like this:
The map is where I establish the general layout, some interesting things in the area and the overall colour palette. I don't always stick to them perfectly as they're meant more as a starting point. But, they do help to convey the vibe for each area to the whole team :)
ESPECIALLY the color pallete is important in this stage. The colour pallete will set the whole tone for the area as we only work with those colors for that area. This is the main way we ensure each area is eadistinguishedished from another (besides theme of course). If you start encountering a new color grass you can be sure you're in unexplored lands!
very early image of Bark Burg :O
When I start putting things in the environments I can really see if things feel nice or have to move. I especially think a lot about what ways you'll be moving through the space. If a rock is really in the way I'll move it or if I'd want to jump up somewhere I'll make that possible. It's important that most ways you'd think about moving about the game would be possible (no jumps you can't quite make so you're not sure if it's possible).
Since this area has a big village aspect to it we needed lots of new props to fill it! Part of that is these cute chairs that can be recolored :)
Everything you see in the game starts out with a drawing like this to get an idea of what it's supposed to look like:
Doing these drawings allows me to hand off some of the work to Mischa Penders, the lovely 3D artist that's been helping me with all of the things that need to be made. It also is much faster to draw something than to fully make it in 3D so it's a cheap/fast way to figure out what something should look like :)
Sometimes there's a reference from children's books or other media for what I want but very often it's straight from my imagination!
Putting all of this together lets me create these wonderfully intricate environments for you to explore!
Putting together an area like this takes me quite some time, anywhere from 4 to 6 weeks. We need to prepare all the 3D models for the area (all areas have bespoke assets and some shared ones). I then need to import everything into the game engine and hand place almost everything is placed by hand and into the environment.
While I do this, I switch to playing the game quite often to walk and jump around in order to make sure everything feels good. It's so much tweaking but it's really worth it when I can finally start taking these lovely screenshots! c:
🪑 Sitting!!! 🪑
You might've noticed it in the Wholesome Direct trailer and/or some of the screenshots already but you can now sit in the game! It's somehting I've been wanting to add for a while and was able to squeeze in just before we had to finish the trailer.
It all starts by animating the sitting. The animation is cut up into 3 distinct parts; sitting down, idling while sitting & standing up. That's so that I can play the sitting down once and then loop the idle until you want to stand up again.
Sitting down in-game simply happens by standing still for 10 seconds! That time can be adjusted in the settings to adjust to your liking (for example to shorten it if you want to go around sitting down everywhere for screenshots). The 10 second default will be adjusted as well based on the testing we'll do in the Beta together :)
You can stand up again by moving, very similar to how it works with the Animal Crossing sitting emote (if you know what that's like).
💬 dialogue icons 💬
I finally added a feature that I'd been thinking about for a while! The game already shows a character names in their associated color to allow you to easier remember who they are. However, I noticed while the demo was out for you all to play that quite a few of you still had trouble remembering who is who.
What I've done to negate this problem is add emojis! Now whenever a character is mentioned (and it makes sense in the context) a little emoji with their face will appear next to their name! That way you can know who is being talked about without having to remember 15+ characters! 😅
This is also integrated in the Handbook where you can keep track of all your deliveries!
∘₊✧────────────✧✿✿✿✧────────────✧₊∘
that's it for today! thanks for reading if you made it all the way here!!
bye bye! <3 ヾ(•ᴗ•๑)o
Kela
🌈 Make sure to join the discord to come hang out with the whole community