All of us here at kmlgames would like to wish you a happy new year! Here’s a development update on what we’ve been working on.
Fireworks
To celebrate the new year, we’ve added a new fireworks item!
In this video you can also see what the game looks like around the festive season of Snowmas.
Colonies minigame
Somewhere in the town of Lovely Plains is a bioscience company. A group of scientists there could use your help researching bacteria. By playing their minigame, you provide them with valuable data on how these various bacterial colonies interact with each other.
The singleplayer version of the minigame is pretty much finished. We’re currently doing small isolated playtests of the minigame and based on the results of that we’ll tune the AI’s difficulty.
Online PvP
Some of you might have noticed that ‘Online PvP’ is listed on the Steam store page. In the Steam release of Lovely Plains, you'll be able to play this minigame (and possibly other minigames) online with or against your friends.
Tech-focussed
This year we did not post a lot of updates, but that does not mean that we’re not working on the game. Some time ago we posted a Twitter thread on why Lovely Plains is taking so long.
To recap: we’re currently focussing on making sure most of the technical systems are ready to build the game we want, so that we don’t end up developing the game into a state where it'll become increasingly hard to add new gameplay. This technical stuff just isn’t too interesting to post, usually.
One of the technical systems that took a huge amount of time this year was the new visual scripting system. It allows us to define gameplay logic for Lovely Plains by placing and connecting logic-blocks. We already had a different system in place for gameplay logic, but this new system just works a lot better and is cleaner to work in. In the future we’ll do a more detailed write-up on why this new system was needed, why we wrote our own and how it works.
Story
This year, we’ve also spent more time writing about the story, lore and sidequests. We have a huge backlog of story ideas we want to put into the game, written as small notes. We’re busy fully writing out these ideas into our design document, so that we end up with a cohesive story. For example (without spoiling too much), the bacteriology lab with the colonies minigame is now part of the larger bioscience company story, and you’re helping them out because each of the labs might have something that you need for some other quests.
2023
From now on, we’ll hopefully post development updates a bit more often.
The next big thing to work on after the colonies minigame’s multiplayer mode will be the inventory rework. The current system hasn’t been changed since the start of development, when it was meant to be a much smaller game. During that time, we’re going to start preparations for the new map feature and level loading. Besides that, we’re also planning on adding a new pedestrian body type soon, to add more variation to the world.
More about the inventory rework, map and new pedestrian in the next development update!
Thank you all for following us on this development journey! We hope that you’ll all enjoy our silly game once it is ready. If you have any questions, leave a comment below! 🙂