June 2021 progress update
Happy to report its been a productive month clearing a lot off the pre-alpha checklist. Admittedly I’m adding quite a lot to the list too, but here’s a quick rundown of my favourite pieces!
Crafting
Alongside foraging, ranching, and buying them at stores, another way of obtaining items is to make them yourself! Rather than being able to always craft everything on the spot, I’ve taken an opportunity to integrate it into the npc character arcs a bit more.
For example, to craft objects or furniture, you’ll need to use a workbench. Until you get your own, there’s one at the workshop you can use. Similarly to mix up new foods for your animals, or fertilisers for your crops, you’ll need to get to the apothecary table.
Once you’re there, you’ll be able to select one of the recipes you’ve unlocked. Recipes are granted through a mix of levelling up, and progression of certain storylines. Recipes consist of required items, quantities, and a difficulty.
Difficulty gets translated into how difficult the crafting task will be. By task, I mean that once you select to Craft something, you'’ll get a quick minigame to complete. When completed, you’ll get the item.
As for the minigame, I’ve kept them very simple for now, and have made sure to code it all in a way that I can comeback to this in the future and beef it up a bit as per player feedback. For now though, I’ve gone with a quick timing input for the workbench, and a maze escape for the Apothecary table.
Lastly on this, I also implemented ‘Player luck’. Luck in Tales of Autumn is similar to weather, wherein each day there’s a chance of it being a ‘lucky day’ (the chance of this can be boosted by unlocking a skill!). If you happen to fail a minigame on a lucky day, there’s a chance it’ll happen anyway!
Swimmers!
Before this update, animals couldn’t care less about the terrain they were walking on. Now they care a lot! Animals the can swim (6 main species at time of writing) will now dive in and swim about, and animals that can’t swim will stop at the water’s edge. Not too complicated, but has been quite a fiddly timing/animation task.
UI Notifications
I was originally unsure on including this at all, but I’m happy with how it turned out. You’ll now get prompts for attaining new animals, reaching new levels with NPCs, and generally achieving greatness. For example:
Crops
This one took a whole week, but thats mainly just due to the sheer amount of content. As before, a feature dive is on the way, but the system is complete with more content than planned the first release.
I included creating the Florist store, which is the primary place to get seeds. I spent a bit of time here going down memory lane to recall what other games had chosen to do re ‘out of season’ crops. Tales of Autumn allows you to plant any crop all year round, and the growth speed of each crop type is affected by the current season.
Library
So I think I mentioned in a previous update that there was going to be a library in the town. Now there is! I’ve been working with placeholder rooms for some time, so now I’m going through them and decorating properly (one a weekend at the moment, as these tend to need a bit more time!).
Run by the character Hal, the library is situated in the top-right of the town. I won’t spoil with details, but there’s an event that happens on the player’s first visit that means the library runs a bit short on books. Over time these get replenished, which you can assist with too.
As a researcher, Hal will take copious notes and often leave his work for you to inspect in the library. When you do, your animal knowledge will increase - which is handy for figuring out how to attract new species to your ranch
Last up, have spent some time on non-development tasks too. I’m now enrolled as a Steam partner, and setup with a company etc. Getting the first physical letter addressed to TALES OF AUTUMN LTD was a nice way to start the day!
