Hello, clan! We’ve just completed another development cycle and big strides have been made in the Pachan culture and the world as a whole. We have a full four seasons, an updated fishing mini-game, a new idea, two new other clans, and big changes in how the characters interact with you and the world.
Winter
It’s time to gather around the fire as snowflakes are falling in the Land Between Two Rivers. You will now be able to experience winter and cycle through an entire year! Each season will continue to be improved, but we’re excited to have reached this milestone!
A few new chill-resistant plants, gatherables, fish, and seasonal music can be found while exploring the land.
Social
We’ve started to give the social aspect of Roots of Pacha a lot more development focus. We added summer and raining schedules, dialogues, and animations to breathe a little more life into the characters' daily routines.
On rainy and snowy days the clan will hunker down inside, but their activities won't stop. You’ll be able to see Pachans hanging out at the Pacha Hearth or at each other's homes. In this development cycle, we added Gin and Tare’s home interior and made it accessible within the alpha. Their home has a little extra grandeur to it from their status within the clan, but they’re still welcoming to their fellow Pachans.
Friendship
Like other farming sims, you’ll be able to talk with and give gifts to NPCs to improve friendship, but true to the culture of the world, dance will also help you connect with characters. But a character won’t want to dance with you right away so you will need to raise your friendship to a point where they’re happy to bust a move with you. You’ll be able to check your friendship status (represented by flowers) in the Journal and see who you’ve given gifts, danced with, and spoken to.
Once you gain enough friendship you will be able to see world-changing events for some characters. We feel it's important that your actions, including your friendships, change the lives of the characters around you. They may start going outside the Land or spending time with other characters.
We have many cutscenes in the works but we started with Frer’s first two. Alpha players will be able to see them at two and four flowers. Since we’re developing for single and multiplayer, these two cutscenes can be experienced by all players at the same time. After these two cutscenes are experienced, Frer’s schedule will change slightly to reflect his character development. We’re excited to expand on this direction in storytelling.
We gave a few characters a makeover. After our Gamescom Festival, we wanted to give Ibon and Jelrod a look that better reflected the divas that they are.
To create the living breathing world we have a lot more cutscenes, schedules, dialogue, animations, and characters to add. But we’re pretty happy with the strides we’ve made these past two months.
Roaming Clans
We’ve started working on two other roaming clans, the Mograni and the Yakuans. These groups seem to be the opposite in almost every way. One lives in the cold North while the other makes the Turtle Islands home. No one remembers what started this feud but the clans have little to no kind words to spare for each other. Thankfully for them, Pacha gave our clan a sign to settle between them. Could this be a part of a larger plan?
Three characters from each clan have been added to the alpha with a few dialogues each. It’s been exciting to see the early stages of this story take shape and we’re looking forward to expanding on it.
Fishing
Like Pachans we strive to better our ideas and our fishing mini-game is one of them. After getting player feedback and testing it ourselves we felt it needed an update. We decided to change the way the hover works and more clearly indicate where you needed to keep your cursor within. From there, an indicator will fill up to 4 bars when it's time to strike. We also changed how the fish became aware of you. Once they see you you have a short time to move the cursor away and wait for them to go back to not noticing you before resuming your progress in catching the fish.
A New Idea
Although Pachans are innately inventive, they’re not the only ones with Ideas. Yakuans and Mogranis have their own way of doing things and have been mastering their surroundings for years. Once they trust you enough, they’ll share their way of living with you and maybe you’ll even invent something together.
Discord bot
Starting in October, instead of having alpha raffles based on the top players of our Discord minigame, everyone will be able to earn “tickets” 🎟️ based on their own achievements.
The clan works together to unlock “fires” that will translate into the number of alpha raffles we do at the end of the month. We start with 2 fires (raffles) and each additional one is unlocked based on everyone’s total contribution.
If you haven’t already, join us now for a chance to win, and hangout with the awesome community. You don’t want to miss the new #🎈-wholesome-memes channel! 💖😂🦆
What’s next
We’ll work to expand on the social aspect like dating and marriage, add new ideas like irrigation, and continue to weave the threads that tie the world together.
Alpha 0.5.0 Knifetooth - Changelog
- Winter season maps.
- Winter plants and gatherables.
- The alpha can now be played continuously and doesn't end on a particular day
- Updated fishing minigame: mouse sensitivity doesn’t affect how it plays, clearer UI, and added the concept of “tension” per fish.
- Fish have a tier assigned to them and the difficulty to catch them changes depending on the tool used.
- Implemented new fishing tool and idea.
- Gifts dialogues for specific items.
- 6 new NPCs from 2 different clans.
- Camps of the new NPCs spawn in the places they can be found on different days.
- 2 heart events with and triggers.
- New NPC dance mechanic: request to dance.
- NPC journal list in the menu.
- NPC friendship mechanic updated.
- New NPC animations for Pachans including them seating on stools and rugs.
- Updated Okka’s “Animal Friendship” idea.
- New schedules for Summer, Rainy days, and variations in regular schedules.
- Can now access Tare’s and Gin’s house.
- Some new dialogues.
- Trees fall to left/right depending on where they are hit, and they won’t fall in invalid places.
- Items can’t be dropped in water/air.
- Partial controller support improved in the world and menus.
- New sound FX for characters’ animations.
- New ambient sounds.
- New music for winter and improvements for the previous seasons.