Feature dive: Biome barn

This time around, I’m sitting on a sand dune staring out to sea, on day two of a four day break in South England, where I don’t have my laptop (the place looked a bit shady!) so I can't write any code. Instead I’ve packed a couple notepads and my to-do list is all planning and content. 

This particular feature dive is on one of the primary features - the ability to tame wild animals and have them stay on your ranch. I don’t want to give too much away, but can cover the main concepts!

In Tales of Autumn, players start with three Ranch buildings; the Coop, Barn and Biome barn.

Any animals that you successfully attract to your ranch will take up a stall in your ‘Biome barn’ for the duration of their stay, and otherwise act like a regular barn animal - they can roam the ranch, need feeding, and can produce items.

Each stall of the biome barn has a control panel which offers a few choices when you interact:

• Study animal to view details on the creature staying there, such as diet requirements or it’s current affection level with you.

• Release animal if you want to set this one free and free up its stall space.

• Change terrain which will give you a choice of terrains (biomes) to set the stall too. Not only does this look a bit nicer, but the stall’s biome is important to keep the animal happy, creating produce, and a chance for special events.

I’m going to stop there - there’s a lot I’m not covering here, but I’m hesitant to reveal too much at this stage. As an extension of the terrain feature, this was definitely on the list from day one. Generally it's all developed, although I have had to redraw the layout twice so far - the first time was because some of the animals turned out a bit bigger than I originally thought, and the second as I was going for a septagon layout but couldn’t really make it work.

Thanks!