Hey guys - Dev here
Come closer, because I will tell you a fun, little secret for why there were no posts the last two months. It's really fun, promise.
The reason is that I want to make news and other posts on Friday afternoon. Ideally I do this after finishing a task, so I have a gif to post. For the last two months, we were working on dozens of small improvements on pretty much every gameplay element inside a level. We do this, because we learned that the game gets too repetitive, so we have to move away from our static level design and unlock principle and give every level some individual touch. This resulted in a lot of small tasks and every Friday I was like: "Ah, let's do this. Won't take long."
Five Once-In-A-Lifetime Historical Events Later
"Ah... It's late. Let's post an update next week."
And here we are. Long overdue update, so let's take a look at what we did since the last update.
Let's start with the juicy news: The Interns Are Back and Modding
Here at Flying Realms we want to follow the idea that interns don't have to provide any value for the company. Instead they pick a thing they want to do, try their best and with some luck we get some value out of it. In the case of Waifu this results in modding, we talked about last year. Progress on the modding front looks really, really good. There are three things modding can do:
Data Asset Modding (That's what tells the game how to go brrrrr)
Prefab Modding (Which allows you make new things to go brrrrr)
Automatic Code Generation (For us devs, so modding goes brrrrr)
As a cool side effect, the automatic code generation works so well that we want to use it for our savegame system. Right now savegame code has to be maintained manually, but all of that can be automated.
Gameplay Variation
As mentioned earlier, we want to address the repetition issue. The lowest hanging fruit for that is the level design. While the level shapes and biomes will grant some diversity, the general gameplay was always identical: Look around, throw crates, pick up unlocks, save the waifu, defeat the monster, get a pillow. Rinse and repeat for every level.
What we want to change is everything before saving the waifu and the probably best way is to drop you a list of what mini-features we added:
Generic Pickups: Instead of having hard-coded pickups, we use a "logic system", where we set conditions and effects to determine what happens when you collect a pickup.
Generic Throwables: Same as the pickups, but for everything that can be thrown.
Generic Environmental Object: Stuff like trees, rocks and so on are no longer bound to hard definitions of what kind of loot they drop. This is also handled by the logic system now.
Generic Interactables: We now can have things you fly up to, press a button and if the logic system says yes, you get something.
Zen Minigame in Levels: The zen minigame can now be done in the levels too.
Surface Elements: Like small stardust specks, which drop stardust on hit.
Monster Evolution: Our content pipeline to make monsters grow and evolve with the difficulty level is like 95% done. We can just drop entire presets of monsters into the level, press a button and these things get merged into one giant waifu stealing glob.
Best Part: All of this relies on Data Asset- and Prefab Modding, including the placement of stuff like trees and machinery. And the monster is also fully moddable.
And here are a few more specific examples of what we can do with all this generic stuff, where some of it is planned and other stuff is possible.
Picnic baskets, which you can throw around and drop food.
Hidden spots you can dig for treasures.
Throw rocks into a grinder to gain stardust.
Caches, which require a specific stat to be opened.
Use zen to activate a machine for more stardust.
We can easily add new pickups like candy bars, more stardust variations or batteries to grant absorbed bullets.
We can easily add new stuff you can yeet around.
New items can be found in more places than just boxes with a question mark.
Environmental objects can have effects like the all-time favorite: Contact Damage
With the logic system we could add some randomness to the monsters. It is not planned though, but possible.
Alright - I hope this update is to your liking. Let us know what you think and have fun.