Hello Photographers! And welcome to the new players Sapphire Safari has gained since our launch on Steam! I will be very honest with you all, the support, feedback, and community growth since we entered Early Access has been downright incredible. I have spent most of my time interacting and commenting on everything everyone has been doing and saying about the game. I have seen countless players strive for that S-Ranked photography license, seen amazing works of fan art, sated the curiosity of hundreds of questions, and read every single review you have all left. The support you have all shown our tiny studio has been overwhelming, and the five of us thank you all very much for your support!
I wanted to share some cool metrics about our growth with you all!
Since launching on Steam, we have…
- Passed 11,000 users on Discord
- Had 670 Overwhelmingly Positive Steam reviews
- Had 200 Photographers achieve an S-Ranked Photography License (100% completion)
- Passed 120,000 Total Owners of Sapphire Safari (all stores, not just Steam)
And a special note here is that the most photographed creature on Sapphire Island is Lecho! What a surprise!
I wish we could collect more details about how everyone plays their games, but generally speaking, everyone plays for about 3-4 hours per session, and about half the player base has managed to become friends with at least one of the creature species.
Before I dive into what we have been building, let me just remind you about our Community Items contest. With the great success of our launch, Steam has opened up our community items eligibility. So we are running a contest to find the art for the trading cards we will have on Steam. There is another post with details on it here: https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1526900/view/524213474678540110
We have also just launched our Community Creature selection tournament, which gives the community a chance to suggest and then vote on creature concepts to add next into Sapphire Safari! You can find all the details for that on our Discord channel here.
IK, oh you Troublesome Devil
So, building an Invest Kinematics system is - quite frankly - difficult. The good news is that floating hands, pevilsies not touching, and dongs incorrectly donging is a thing of the past. Using IK, we have fixed all the issues of animations being misaligned and meat rods poking out and around places they should not. But it wouldn’t be without its own share of issues as well. Since the system is largely automatic (and it needs to be, otherwise we could never build additional content), it means there are a few oddities that have been introduced.
Our entire focus right now is on fixing these particular issues before we can push the build to the public. They tend to show up under extreme conditions, like in the Pink Moon event, and with overly handsy moments in the gameplay structure. This means that while most users won’t see the problems, some will. The enjoyment of everyone is important to us.
Naturally, the system will get a lot of future tweaks as well, it is impossible we can catch everything on the first pass, but it will be CONSIDERABLY better.
Future Plans
Once we are done with v026 (the IK patch), the crew is planning to move on to one of the last remaining “large tech debt” mechanics we have to build. This mechanic is so important for the future health of the game that it would be very silly not to build it as early as possible. In an ideal world, we would have had it done before coming to Steam, but alas, that didn’t happen. I am talking about the Lifestyle Director. It is an AI director, but since the well has been poisoned for the term “AI”, we are just gonna call it the Lifestyle Director instead (since this means the artificial intelligence of the island natives).
A drastic change to how the game handles NPC creatures. Currently, Sapphire Safari is employing tricks, teleports, shuffling, and systems to make the island feel “full” of life. Instead, it is about 10 or so creatures being reused over and over again as the player wanders around the island. I would say we built it very well, as almost no one noticed how it works, but it also means we cannot “expand” the intelligence of the NPCs without breaking the system. So an overhaul is needed.
The new system will spawn hundreds of little “ghosts” around the island, containing basic information about the creature (colour, gender, state). These ghosts are controlled by the Lifestyle Director, who, in turn, tells the ghosts what to do. Most will stay with their species inside their “nests” and safe regions. Others will venture outside their homes and complete objectives, go on adventures, get into trouble, bang their neighbors, and then travel home when the day ends to sleep in the safety of their nest.
If the player encounters a ghost, it is only at that point that a mesh (model, physics, etc) spawns into the world. This means, if you track a creature you like, it will actually do something, it will go about its business, deal with its desires, and flee correctly once danger appears. It will also allow events like species migration to happen, or for sheep to travel in groups to feeding grounds. Unique species mechanics depending on what behaviours they should have.
Sounds good, right? We think so too. We project that this will take several months to build, though. But worry not, we will be opening up a beta branch on Steam, and within it, we will be putting semi-frequent updates. The current thinking is that your existing save files will not carry over to the beta branch due to how very broken we expect the builds to be. And if you do participate in the beta, please understand just how unpolished we expect it all to be. You will be warned about it if you somehow accidentally turn on the beta tree or something.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1526900/Sapphire_Safari/
So yeah, that is about it. The next patch will have a bunch of other exciting features inside it as well, but I will leave those as a surprise for when we drop that build. Until then, thank you all very much for joining us!