April 2021 progress
The first month-end since launching the site, and I thought it’d be cool to give a quick rundown of the main items completed that month.
On April 1st I decided to get a little more organised with regards to prioritising the tasks. I’ve focused and shuffled everything around an alpha build, which will contain everything to do with animals and exploring. This extends to everything players would need to actually operate, such as a way to buy animal feed, or sell items to earn money. The main features not included in the alpha are character schedules, storyline and events. They’ll be there for the beta though!
Farm store
Ruths farm store is open for business! Ruth’s store is located in the Store district area, where you can drop in to buy animals and supplies for your coop and barn. When ordering an animal, you can name them and pick their colour variant.
Alpacas!
April saw 8 new top-level species added, and I’ll show off Alpacas now. You get them at Ruth’s, and they’ll live in your barn. Currently I’ve got four variants for you to pick from when ordering. They are another multi-harvest animal, producing both milk and wool on separate schedules.
Music management
No screenshots for this one, but I’ve got a complete framework for managing all of the game’s music. Each season will have a set of themes, and each day one of those is randomly selected. The themes are split up into an ‘intro’ which kickoff as the day starts, then changes into a ‘main loop’ cycling until 6pm, where it finishes the current loop and then transitions to an outro which will end somewhere between 8 and 10pm depending on the track. Rooms with their own themes, cutscenes and special events can all pause this as needed, and ambience or objects that have their own sound effects will just play those themselves.
Selling
The next big item was the shipping bin - a staple feature for this game genre, and one of the ways that players can earn money in Tales of Autumn. There are two set shipping bins (once unlocked) where throughout the day players can deposit items to be sold overnight, or retrieve items they’ve changed their mind on. There’s a few extra bits I added whilst doing this, such as a sales history and price lists (ready for the travelling merchants) as well as updating the Chests to work the same way.
Lastly, the main area that I’ve been working on is The Swamp.
Decorating these definitely tests the whole ‘labour of love’ statements as I’m pretty slow at it. I definitely need to figure out a more productive way of doing them as I’ve quite a few areas to do!
The focus for May is to continue on the Alpha list ready for people playtesting in June. Some specifics:
Dunes and Forest area
Player journal
Player experience and skills
Support for different screen resolutions (could be a monster or a one day task, we’ll see!).
April felt pretty productive, I got at least two hours in every day which never feels like enough but at least it's consistent! It's definitely gotten to the point now where I’m thinking I could be done in a month or so if it wasn’t for a day job in the way. But you know, responsibilities, bills etc.
