[KICKSTARTER: 30% FUNDED!] Village Monsters - Animal Crossing, but with monsters!

Kickstarter


Trailer


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Quick Info
Release: October 2018 for PC / Mac / Linux
Genre: Life Sim
Alpha Demo: http://warpdogs.com/were-release/
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/VillageMonsters
Good Vibes?: Yes
Monsters?: Absolutely


Summary
Have you ever wondered what happens inside the world of an abandoned video game? All those NPCs with their artificial lives...what do they do after the game is turned off for that final time?

Village Monsters is a relaxing life sim game set in one such world.

You play as someone booting up the game for the first time in decades only to discover that it is nothing like you remember.

The monsters that were once enemies have thrown away their weapons and have settled down in a peaceful village that they created.
Stranger still, they're inviting you to come join them.

• Personalize your very own home with furniture, decorations, and upgrades. Plant a garden! Install a secret room! Sit on a golden throne you found in the woods!
• Get to know dozens of whimsical monster neighbors, each with their own personalities, activities, and problems to solve.
• Pick up a new hobby, like fishing, botany, critter collecting, archaeology, or cooking, then donate your findings and creations to the Historical Society of Monsters.
• Leave your mark on the village by unlocking new buildings and influencing its development over time.
• Fill out your daily routine with activities like shopping, talking with villagers, watching TV, hunting for mushrooms, and so much more.

• An immersive day / night cycle where everything has a schedule to keep - the villagers, the birds, and even the flowers.
• Dynamic weather changes including dozens of distinct weather types ranging from clear skies to thundersnow.
• The world changes with the seasons, and you can expect activities, items, creatures, and even music unique to each season.
• A packed calendar full of holidays ensures that every week brings something new. Enjoy events like the monthly Critter Safari, the springtime Good Egg Day Feast, and the Pumpkin Patch Bash.

• Explore a digital land that?s been transformed by its abandonment.
• Experience a unique story told through unusual methods such as via item descriptions, overheard conversations, and anomoly research.
• Help unravel the unknown by investigating and solving Mysteries, a unique type of quest system.
• Complete a massive compendium that logs your journey through the game. Use it to track Mysteries, collectibles, secrets, and triumphs.

Woah omg this is amazing
This most have taken a long af time by yourself. Props dude c:

Bunnilla said:

Woah omg this is amazing
This most have taken a long af time by yourself. Props dude c:

Click to expand...

Thanks for the kind words! Hasn't been that long - about 6 months or so. But I am working on it full time!

I definitely take pride in working quickly, though, and I expect the full release to be done by next year.

My internal (and half-kidding) goal is to get it out before the next animal crossing!

It's the weekend, so that means I get to share all I worked on last week in another edition of the Developer Diary Digest!


EVENT & HOLIDAY SYSTEM

It seems like I've been putting off a holiday / event system for at least the last 6 months. It's one of the systems I've been most anticipating, but it relied on too many other moving pieces to work on...well, until now!

At the dawn of each day, the game now checks if there's an event scheduled, and if so it fires off any scripts related to it. It's pretty robust, and the scripts can do things like create holiday-specific visitors, add new music or decorations, change dialog, and a lot more.


As I wrapped it up, I realized that I needed a way to inform the player about upcoming events and what they were all about. This naturally lead into the next thing I worked on...


A POSTAL SERVICE

You can now receive letters from villagers, visitors, and other friendly monsters in the game. The goal is to integrate the mail system into as many other parts of the game as I can. For example, you'll get a flyer the day before each holiday that explains it:


Letters you receive from villagers will reflect their personalities as well as their disposition toward you. Most will be helpful or friendly, but others, like Taswell,


probably won't be at first.

As I said above, I want mail to be integrated into as many other systems as I can. As I was browsing my list of features I got to "The ability to submit feedback from in-game" when I suddenly had an idea...


SENDING FEEDBACK VIA IN-GAME POSTAL SERVICE

...wouldn't it be cool if you could write letters to the developer from inside the game itself?


Now obviously there's a lot of things to consider here - security, spam protection, etc. - but the idea is so cool to me that I'll do whatever it takes to make it work.

It's hard enough to encourage users to submit feedback, so providing something in-game that's also contextualized via a system they're going to be using every day can only help!


BIRD SONG

Finally, I'll end this week sharing a new 'flavor' feature.

If you've played any of the demos you've likely seen birds flying about every so often. But unlike real life, they've been totally silent.

Well not anymore! Birds that fly overhead will now chirp and caw and sing. I obviously can't record sounds via gifs, so I tried my best to provide an alternative:


Well that'll do it for this week. Enjoy your weekend, y'all!

omg I love the mail system
and players being able to send you feedback is a cool concept o:
the bird thou x)

You do enough in a week to make a weekly digest

That feels like more than I accomplish in a week LOL. I spent nearly a entire week trying to stop fish from leaving the river and swimming across land. And it took 3 days just to draw all the fishing animation sprites. but that's because I seem to over-complicate everything

We need more awesome fangames on these forums. Since that Hidden Valley or such went inactive, I've been hoping to see more concepts like this.

Thanks for the kind words, Silversea! I absolutely adore your game and before I started posting here I was following it for some time. I definitely agree that it'd be cool if there were even more games out there taking inspiration from Animal Crossing

In terms of speed, I work fast, but I'm also ok with leaving things rough for later. For example, there's a mail system, but I haven't written all the mail yet. My work pattern is to create a system and let it marinate a bit before adding content to it. I used to get bogged down in making things perfect, but I found it was just not successful for my style work

Aha, yes I hate leaving things in "substitute" form. My mindset is usually if I work on something I might as well get it done.

Ah, well it's not quite placeholder stuff. It's kinda like building a house - instead of finishing the rooms one at a time, I'm building the frame, seeing how it looks, seeing if messes with my plans for plumbing or electricity, then I'm off to the next room!

That analogy sorta got away from me

Omg dude this is amazing! I can't wait for this. It sort of reminds me of Hidden Land. A game I made some years ago. This look much better in every aspect though. It even has features I wished to put in Hidden Land but my coding was too poor at the time.

Kip said:

Omg dude this is amazing! I can't wait for this. It sort of reminds me of Hidden Land. A game I made some years ago. This look much better in every aspect though. It even has features I wished to put in Hidden Land but my coding was too poor at the time.

Click to expand...

Kip lives

Kip said:

Omg dude this is amazing! I can't wait for this. It sort of reminds me of Hidden Land. A game I made some years ago. This look much better in every aspect though. It even has features I wished to put in Hidden Land but my coding was too poor at the time.

Click to expand...

Hey, thanks! Do you think you'll ever go back to Hidden Land?

WarpDogsVG said:

Hey, thanks! Do you think you'll ever go back to Hidden Land?

Click to expand...

Definitely some day. As soon as I'm able to open a Patreon I plan on starting Hidden Land 2. I want to keep the game free but still have some kind of support. My coding and art have come a long way so the idea of starting a new one gets me excited.

For now though I'll just stick to following the progress of other projects.

That's great to hear, and I look forward to seeing HL2

It's the weekend, so that means I get to share everything I worked on last week in yet another edition of the Developer Diary Digest!

Before I begin, I wanted to quickly plug something. You might not know this, but I have a newsletter for Village Monsters, and I would absolutely love it if you signed up for it!


Newsletter Signup: https://tinyletter.com/Village-Monsters

I try to reserve the newsletter for only big ticket items, so you'll be the first to know of releases and other important news.

Anyway, back to the update!

---

I had a few really productive weeks this month, so I guess I was 'due' to have a slow one. I didn't get nearly as much done as I had hoped, and I ended up getting caught in a few technical quagmires; still, I have things to share, so let's get on with it!

Fleshing Out Hobbies
From day 1 of development I knew that hobbies were going to be a major feature of Village Monsters. When you aren't talking with villagers, improving your house or solving mysteries, you'll probably be progressing your skills (and making money) with one of the various hobbies

Critter Capturing was the first hobby I put in, followed by Fishing and Archaeology. I had a bunch of ideas for other hobbies to add to the mix, but I wasn't sure which ones would work best. Well, until now.


Village Monsters will now contain five hobbies for you to enjoy: Cooking, Critter Capturing, Botany, Fishing, and Archaeology. This post details some new updates to two of them.

Botany Prototyping
Botany is one of the new hobbies I've been working on, and it includes everything plant related.

The reason I'm going with Botany instead of something like Gardening is that you'll be able to do way more than grow a simple garden

This week, I played around with planting & watering trees, as well as managing growth as time progresses - assuming you make sure to water and care for them each day


Like all prototypes it's a big work-in-progress. However, thanks to feedback from a user at another site I've had some intriguing ideas that I'm keeping under my hat. Stay tuned next week, yeah?

Fishing Revamp
Fishing was one of the first hobbies I implemented, but I haven't touched it since. It's in a sorry state as of the last demo, and I'm pretty embarrassed by how bad it is.

What began as a 'revamp' quickly turned into a 'refactor' which the became a total 'rewrite'. I tossed out all my old code and rewrote it from the ground up.


It was a slow process, but fishing is in a much better state in terms of stability and mechanics. Work will continue on this system this week as well.

I've always been dissatisfied with fishing minigames in other life-sim games, so I'm going in a different direction. You can expect a system that's much more inspired by JRPGs than any existing life-sim out there.

Quality of Life
To wrap up, I also included a grab bag of bug fixes and quality of life improvements that I received from demo feedback.

Trees should behave better and no longer give you a permanent hug. Birds fly a bit slower. The keyboard control scheme was reworked. Critters should hopefully not crash the game as much. Your bit (currency) balance is now shown when you add or subtract from it

And so on.

I also got a lot of writing in this week as well. Every item - every single item - has a unique description and flavor text. Some even have detailed backstories. Pretty nuts, right? Well it's been a ton of fun, so there's no stopping me now.


Until next time!

Oh wow, my game ended up on RPS of all things. That's so wild.

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2017/07/31/village-monsters-life-sim/#more-465515

Congrats man!

It's the weekend, and that means another edition of the Village Monsters Dev Diary Digest (VMD3)!

Like last week I have a bit of housekeeping to do before diving in. Longtime followers know that I've tried several different ways to present progress updates, but none of them have really 'stuck'. However, it seems this weekly format has really been working for me.

As such, I went ahead and created an archive for every Dev Diary Digest I've posted since I started doing them. If you missed earlier editions, or if you just want to see how far I've come, then please do take a look!

http://warpdogs.com/developer-diaries/

Anyway, onto the update

Pets
I may have shared this anecdote before, but the road to pets was a serendipitous one

A few weeks ago I was working on debugging critter behavior, and for whatever reason I was testing it in the player's house. As I kept going in and out of the house it occurred to me how much I actually liked having a critter there - it was sort of like having a pet! Wouldn't it be cool if that was an actual feature?

This week I was able to prototype this idea:


Here's how it works: first, you gotta catch a critter. Then, walk up to an special item (currently a pet bowl) and select the pet you want to tame. You can only tame one at a time, so choose wisely

At first, all critters start out as "Wild", and they'll act much like they did before you caught them. Over time, if you feed them and treat them well they'll increasingly become tame and more affectionate.

Tamed critters will also continue to behave similarly to their wild versions, and they'll retain any unique attributes. For example, if you catch a Snowflake Elemental he'll make your entire house cold; good during the summer, but not so good if you have a lot of fish on display...

Hail / Thunderboomers
I always enjoy working on weather systems, so I took a detour to add a new weather type - Hail


I had to improve the weather system to handle the little hail pellets, and these improvements should help with any 'ground based' weather effects in the future...leaf piles in the fall, snowdrifts, rain puddles, and so on.

I then went ahead and added more sound effects to the various weather types. I also added a minor feature where weather sounds can still be heard indoors at a lower volume. It's surprisingly atmospheric, especially during thunderstorms!

UI Improvements (Map, Inventory, Notices)
Finally, though I generally don't like it, I also spent a great deal of time on UI work. I've never enjoyed UI work, not even at my last job where functionality was preferred over looks, but I'm actually pretty happy with how things shook out this time.

First, I added a map for the village to the Compendium. It's very basic and just lays the foundation for future maps:


I then added movement to various notifications. I like it a lot better than the notices just appearing suddenly.


Finally, I completely blew up and reworked the inventory. I actually did this some time ago, but I added an extra layer of polish and usability this week. It's unquestionably better than the old inventory, but that's not saying much - the old one was really bad!

Anyway, that's it from me. As usual I also added a lot of minor things, quality of life improvements, and bugfixes, but nothing I need to call out. Have a good week!

this is incredible! much respect to you dude, hope this becomes a success

Thanks buddy! Hope I can live up to it