After we got the basics out of the way, we can now move on to the game. To start this off, I want to recap the first few months of development and give you some insights about what parts of the game have gotten most of my attention
In general, I would say that I'm still deep in the prototyping/framework-building phase of the development process. Many of the gameplay elements and systems do need quite a lot of programming before any content or depth can be added. This also means that progress at this time is less visual, and if visuals are part of the progress, they are often not final, so they won't be shared. When this changes, I will also give you some more visuals so that you can see what is being added.
So far, most of my time and energy have gone towards the building system. This is because: 1. It is the gameplay aspect that needs the most framework programming; and 2. It is the basis for many other systems I want to integrate. For example, it would make no sense to implement the guests that will be coming to your ranch if there is no ranch. The way ranches can be built and, as a result, how they are going to look play a major role in how I need to set up guests, staff, etc. This is why a lot of my work so far has focused on the player being able to switch between different building modes (top-down and first-person) and how creative freedom and gameplay balancing can be combined in the building mechanics. During the process and in the future, I had and will have to scrap many of my initial ideas. For example, I thought you could just build walls, and then my future self would figure out how the game might know where a room begins and ends. It turns out I didn't, and it's just way easier to place rooms into your buildings first and then build walls around them. These fallacies can be very frustrating and time- consuming, but they are an unavoidable part of the development process.
Other parts of the game only exist on paper so far. The open worlds and breeding are examples of systems that I have a solid plan for but haven't touched on in development. In general, I try to first answer all the hard questions I have in mind about my game before I move into the simpler development challenges and the creation of content.
Besides building, riding has gotten most of my attention. I have gone from an initial set of horse model and animations to another, which I then modified and fixed to get my current iteration, which will probably also not be final. The riding controls are heavily inspired by real (and obviously simplified) riding techniques and optimized for the controller. You control your horse with leg and reign signals and by shifting the weight of the rider. Although a lot of tweaking will be necessary, I'm happy with the basis I have there.
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