Hey everyone, hope you are off to a lovely summer so far. Over here at Hoftware.io, we are working hard to continue to iterate on It Takes a Village and provide better and polished gameplay mechanics to the game. Its been a while since we've had a proper update, so lets dive right in to the new features that I've been working on the last months.
Forest Biome
As a villager, you're going to want to build your village. To do so, you're going to need some new resources and recipes in order to do that and to progress in the game. Over the last two months, I've been planning and building out the first biome/level that you will take on in the game. In the image above you can see my crude attempt at level design. It reminded me of all the game manuals I used to buy for each of the GameBoy Pokemon games. Once I had this plan in place, I was able to implement it in the game world.
Archery
I wanted to add some variety to the types of combat you can play around with in-game. I also want to add some variety to the puzzles that I'll put in to the game that will utilize combat in nuanced ways. This is where archery comes in. I've tried to implement it similar to how you'd expect in old-school Zelda games.
Quest System
No RPG is complete without a quest system. And mine is no different. But, I did take the liberty of gutting the idea of a quest system down to the basic level. This is partially for saving myself work and complexity down the line and partially for me actually wanting to release this game at some point. With that said, I was able to add villagers who can trigger quests, give you specific items, and trigger world events. This was the last system I needed for the base demo to be complete! This is a huge milestone as it means I can focus now on smashing bugs and making the game as fun as I can instead of working on the core systems.
The Demo
Now, we are full steam ahead towards getting a demo out so that you guys can go ahead and play the game. I'm hoping to have this ready in the next two months. I set a goal for the end of summer to have a demo ready to go.
Thank you so much for your support so far! I'm grateful for those of you who are interested in my small project. It means the world to me.
I've started a Twitter account where I'm posting more regular feedback. If you're interested in following along more intently, give me a follow and feel free to reach out with more personal feedback!
https://x.com/Hoftware
Thanks,
Brandon | Hoftware.io