May has flown by alarmingly quickly, and whilst I went a little off plan, I’m pretty happy with the development progress. The main event was the player menu and all the underpinning features, so that’ll be the focus of this update!

Menu: Player overview

In this first tab you can see some basic information on your character, such as money, town karma level, and some pet details. You can also see your experience points, current level, and any skills you’ve purchased.

You’ll earn experience points whilst exploring, progressing stories and completing quests. With enough experience points you’ll go up a level and earn a skill point, which you can spend here in the Player overview.
Skills available include some stat modifiers, such as a permanent increase to your energy capacity, or they can increase certain proficiencies, such as making fishing easier, or unlocking a new tier of apothecary recipes.
So a fairly straightforward system I feel, and here comes the bill… the design currently has a level cap at 10, meaning through the course of the game you’ll earn 10 skill points. At the moment there are 16 skills. So, you can’t unlock everything in a single playthough. I’m keen to hear feedback once people start playing it, and am even more intrigued to know which skill combinations people will go for! The 10 is somewhat arbitrary and easily changed if players generally feel it’s too low, but I’m set on not being able to attain every single skill at once.

Menu: Map

Much quicker to explain this one. The next tab is a map. It does things typically associated with maps, and I won’t screenshot this one just yet as to keep the world a secret for a while longer!

Menu: Animal overview

The Animal tab serves two purposes - players can see the details of the animals already staying at their ranch across the three buildings, or they can open their journal to see information about the wild animals of the world. There are four levels of animal knowledge for each animal in the game, and the information in the journal reacts to that knowledge.

Why does this matter? Well, the journal isn’t just a place for me to unload lore text. Each subspecies has different requirements to join the Ranch, some preferences whilst they’re there, and then further requirements to produce items. So, it’s more of a reference / checklist to see what you’d need to change or acquire in order to have a new animal take up residence.

Menu: Autumnsfolk

I’m not 100% on the name, but I don’t have any alternatives lurking! I’m referring to the townsfolk - all the neighbouring characters and visitors to the town. Players can see who they’ve met, their affection level, a brief description, and once it’s known (through increased affection levels) it’ll also show their favourite items, disliked items, and birthday.

Menu: Quests

Quests was a far more straightforward task as I already had the structure in place, and I just had to make it prettier. Once players initiates a quest, it’ll show up in this tab as a reminder/progress tracker. Once a quest is complete, any rewards can be claimed through here too.

Menu: Tutorials

Inspired primarily by Graveyard Keeper’s approach, I’ve been creating tutorials as single images to try and make them as succinct as possible. They’ll be shown when first interacting with the feature, and players will be able to revisit tutorials at any time thereafter through this menu tab.

Menu: System

Last up, a means to quit the game and toggle between fullscreen and windowed display modes. Any further options I end up creating will go here too (keybindings for example, though that’s highly unlikely for the alpha!).

Well that took up more text than I thought it would. For anyone still with me at this point, I’ll preview one (of the 6) animals added in May.

Frogs!

There’s four subspecies for now, each showing up in a different part of the map under different circumstances (one is nocturnal for example).

This grumpy gal is from the swamp >

If you meet a frog’s stay requirements it’ll stay in your biome barn, where they prefer the water biome.

As for the fantasy-esque design, I like the tail. Plus they’re pretty big - Quina would be happy.

June’s priorities remain running to an alpha status and get people playing it. Specifically that’s a lot of room decorating and content writing for the next few weeks. When I thought it a good idea to add ~10 pieces of unique dialogue per subspecies I didn’t consider just how much that really is!

Thanks for reading!

May 2021 progress