[Dev Log] Village Monsters - A Monstrous Life Sim Game

Trailer


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.

News
and we're back! Now with a increased focus on dev logging and feedback requests and less trying to sell you on the game itself

Been a busy month for obvious reasons, but I'm hard at work on the game again.

Over this last week I've been working on gardening, a new type of activity that falls under the Botany hobby.



It's not quite Harvest Moon yet, but it's close~

Onward!

I put up a new demo today, which you can download right here -

http://warpdogs.com/were-release/



It includes the gardening changes I mentioned in the first post + lots of big fixes and improvements.

As an FYI, all demos are 100% free. I also have a little mechanism in-game that lets you send me feedback, and I would absolutely love to know what you fine folks have to say about it!

I'm working on some cool things this week. I think have one more demo in me before the Kickstarter ends, and I'm going to make it a big one.

Here's are the things I'm cooking in the oven!



First up - the town has time traveled to autumn!

Of course, the timescale in the game is not based on real time, but I was feeling so autumn-y that I had to get my spook on. You'll find a new tileset, plenty of spooky decorations and creatures, and even new music!



Next, I'm re-implementing + giving more love to some of the Glitch Powers in the game. Meet the new-and-improved Buzzsaw Bug Net. I'm hoping to have a post up later on that dives how exactly Glitch Powers work



This is something I've promised to do for awhile, but it ended up being a lot harder to implement than I had planned

The game now officially has better diversity. You can't choose your appearance right now (on account of me being real bad at UI), but when you start the game you'll be randomly assigned one of 6 sprites.

(Of course in the final game you'll have full control)



Finally, I'm showing the Compendium even more love - as I mentioned before, it's been renamed to the Journal. It has new pages, better controls, and is overall getting more useful

I've also done a flurry of bugfixing: A crash related to surface lighting has been fixed, plenty of collision / layering issues have been fixed, critters are a bit more sensible, and lots more.

The current plan is to keep tossing new features and ideas and release the demo by Saturday

Man, I am up super late tonight. I hope the Kickstarter ending brings me back to a normal sleep schedule

Anyway, sometime tomorrow (today?) I hope to put up the final demo release of October. I'm going all out with this one as eluded to in my previous post!

Oops, I never actually shared my demo here once I released it! Here's the link to download + patch notes:

http://warpdogs.com/2017/10/08/village-monsters-alpha-1-06-out-now/

Would be very interested to hear feedback on this one, as I'm about to embark on another 2-month dev cycle and now's the time to start planning what it'll look like.

It's still an Alpha, though, so just bear that in mind if you do play it!

Congrats on hitting the goal! That last day was tense...

A minor note on the art direction: I would advise keeping shading consistent over all objects and sprites. You have some buildings shaded from the top, some from the bottom, trees are shaded from the bottom and sides. Some objects have shading so narrow it is hard to see (such as the rocks, and the ghost NPC), while others have really deep shading (pine trees).

I know I'm always picking over art especially in my own projects, but keeping consistency is more of a generally accepted standard (such as never saving pixel art as a jpeg!).

Hah, you're telling me. The path to victory was a strange one, but it was such an important first step. I'm glad it's over. More to the point, I'm glad I was finally able to take a break; I actually took a weekend off - and a 3 day weekend at that! - for the first time since...man, January? December? It's been awhile.

Regarding art, I think you're right. More generally, I just have never learned the proper rules or techniques that I should. I hadn't done a single piece of pixel art until I started this project earlier this year, and I thought I could learn how to do art like I learn everything else - by experimentation and tinkering.

And it's sorta worked, but it's also left me with inconsistent, amateurish art that looks very '1st draft'. So uh, I guess it didn't work after all. One of the ways I'm addressing this is going back 'to school', so to speak, and learning the proper ways to do things now that I have some practical tools in my belt.

We'll see if it works, but I'm hopeful that i have the time and resources to get it done.

If you said that you'd update it all eventually that would be a perfectly good response. Most importantly you have a working game -- graphics can be edited at any time.

...and we're back!

It seems like every single day since the Kickstarter ended there has been one thing after another...doctor appointments, car appointments, flying to a wedding 3500 miles away, a very bad stomach bug...

It's been awhile, but I should be back to normal at long last. Let's see if I remember how to do this Dev Diary Digest thing...

What's in a name?
There's a part in one of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy books that talks about learning how to fly. In short, it involves throwing yourself at the ground and then becoming so distracted by something surprising that you forget to hit the dirt. Tada, you're flying!

I mention this because at times it feels like my brain works the same way. I've had a lot of unnamed characters in the game for awhile now, and no matter how hard I tried I just couldn't figure out their names.

Then I spent the last week being very distracted and then bam, all of a sudden all these names come flooding into my head.

Many villagers will placeholder names have now been renamed. The post-punk pixie postwoman has been named Glimmer. Rainboy, the elemental, has been renamed Boros. The ever-popular cola ghost has been named Ebey.


Along with their new names I also took the time to better flesh out their personalities and motivations. I'm looking forward to reintroducing all of them to you!

Camera Work
A number of improvements have been made to the game's camera.

The biggest change is that the camera is now a great deal more zoomed out. The previous camera was a bit too claustrophobic, and I certainly wasn't doing my sprites any favors by making them that large.


You also have the ability to switch to the previous zoom level at any time, though I may change that.

The dynamic camera has again been re-enabled for what feels like the 3rd or 4th time. I think it's here to stay now.

Finally, a number of draw distance changes / improvements have been implemented.


An Informative Toolbelt
One common complaint from previous releases is that some abilities are just not clear enough - that's to be expected this early in the process, but I've been making it a priority to improve the overall usability of the game.

A new toolbelt menu has been added that makes it easier to see which tools you have as well as their names and descriptions for how they work.


In the future this menu will be expanded so that you use left / right to navigate to the category of tool (like Critter Catching Equipment) and then use up / down to select the specific tool (Bug Net, Traps, etc.)

Like all UI it'll be a work in progress right up until the 11th hour, but I'm much happier with this than what I had before.

I'm still having trouble getting my sea legs, assuming "sea legs" means making time for regular updates!

Anyway, it's still technically the weekend so I'm not late yet! Let's dig into this week's Dev Diary Digest.

IMPROVED GRAPHICS
If you could somehow make a word cloud of my all my posts and tweets in the last year then I'm sure "I'm not an artist!" would stand out.

I mean, it's true - I'm not an artist! - but I'm going to stop using that as a caveat and instead focus on getting better.

Here's some things I improved this week.

First, I prettied up the initial player house (it's still a shack, though) and the dog house upgrade. I also added new fog effects to differentiate it as a weather type


Here's a WIP version of the new player character (male). Not implemented in game yet, but I like him a lot better than the old model


Finally, I've started making the UI more colorful than it was before. This is still a mighty WIP, but a lot of my UI design before was brown, black, or white, and that seem antithetical to a game that's meant to be colorful and cartoony

Here's a mockup of the new inventory + new tool icons


NEW SOUND EFFECTS
I can't exactly make screenshots of these changes, but this week I spent a lot of time on adding new sound effects and improving the ones that are there.

There are improved footstep sound effects for inside and outside, new sound effects for using tools, interacting with furniture, more ambient sounds, and much more.

FISHING CHANGES
Finally, I've been fleshing out fishing. It's been one of the weaker hobbies for awhile and it needed a lot of love.

First, I added two new features:

1. Your fishing skill now controls how well you can identify a fish before you actually hook it. Novice fishermen will see just vague silhouettes, while seasoned fishermen will see full details and labels. This'll make catching rare or valuable fish a lot easier

2. You now have a net you can deploy while fishing. Unlike the rod, you have almost no control after you toss it into the water. However! If it hits a fish it ensnares them in place which makes it much easier to hook and reel to the surface. It also adds a bit more variety to fishing instead of just watching your line


Beyond those new features, I've also overhauled a lot of the graphics, sounds, and behaviors. Fish now behave a bit more fish-like, the casting / hooking mechanics have been re-balanced, and there are actual animations for most actions. It's a big improvement! I hope.