Welcome
Hey! Welcome to another Dreadwinter blog, this time around it's the spooky edition (not that anything changes). There's a few things that happened that I want to talk about, and I'll also elaborate more on what the next steps are in the game's development, so stick around!
Steam Next Fest
Dreadwinter was part of this years October Steam Next Fest! It's a week long event made to showcase upcoming games and demos, and is very useful for getting eyes on your game.
There have been a lot of people playing the demo, and putting Dreadwinter on their wishlist! Thanks for playing, and/or wishlisting. The demo will still be around, and will get updates when available, so keep an eye out!
Bugs and Improvements
I think one thing that needs to be improved is guiding the player at the start of the game. There were a few comments that players weren't sure what to do or where to go. I wanted to give players a lot of freedom in how they played from the start, but I think it's a good idea to guide players along until the core gameplay is introduced.
For example, when you start the game, you wake up, and from there you can go wherever you want. I expected most people would leave their apartment, see the cafe, and head there first, but it seems some players chose to wander around first, and got a bit lost!
I'll work on streamlining the experience, and making it a bit more obvious as to what you need to do to start off.
A Frustrating Bug
There is currently a bug that may occur when moving between levels, such as entering/leaving Dreadwinter, your room, or the furniture store (these seem to be common locations). When you move to another location, there is a chance that your character will warp, but the game does not realise that you have moved to another level, and so the camera will not follow, as well as certain background things not happening.
This makes it seem like you are stuck in a level, and is essentially a soft lock. I have an idea of what's happening, but I don't know what's causing it, and I currently am unable to reproduce the bug myself. It doesn't seem to be a consistent bug, which makes it quite hard to figure out.
For now, as a short term fix, I plan to add a "stuck" button for when this occurs. It seems that you can still access the menus, and the game continues as normal, which makes me believe that you still have control, but the camera is no longer tracking your character. The "stuck" button will warp you to a safe location, which should hopefully reset things.
I plan to add manual saves to the game as well, and have the game autosave after a cafe shift, so you don't lose too much progress if you have to restart. There's a lot of extra data that has to be saved, so I'm not sure how long this will take to add.
What's Next
I outlined my plans in the last blog post, but here it is again:
Remaining townspeople in Lunara (Around 10 or so)
Interiors for buildings/homes in Lunara
Manual saves
Functioning Dreadwinter expansions (Being able to unlock the expansions + gameplay features)
Automation in Dreadwinter (Via machines)
Takeaway mode - Serve orders to go! Seating not required!
Adding in the story/stories
I'm currently designing the remaining NPCs in the game, and their homes, as well as any other interiors that aren't finished. Here's a preview of what I did in the last few days:
It's been a while since I designed new characters, so I'm glad to be getting back into it. Afterwards, I'll try to get manual saves into the game, hopefully I don't break it!
That's it for this blog post, thanks for reading, it was a bit of a long one!
-Alex