Hello again everyone!
So, dialogue is here! You can finally hear your character being cold, starving, exhausted and generally complaining about the horrible afflictions that come with surviving an arctic environment. The way I decided to implement voice lines is a little experimental as I have implemented a system whereby the game won't play voice lines while music is playing. This is purely because I couldn't implement them in such a way where music didn't drown out voice lines and make them hard to understand without making the music so quiet it lost it's impact. As always, let me know what you think of this system and if it doesn't work out then I will look at overhauling it in the future! And as an cool little extra detail, this addition takes Into the Wild out of alpha and into beta, since dialogue was the last unimplemented major feature! No more major features until after release day now, just refinements and additions to existing game systems
This update also comes with some small changes that I think will have a big impact on gameplay. The first of these changes is that the time it takes stamina to both drain and regen has been significantly lengthened, as it helps stamina to both feel more like a resource that needs to be carefully managed, as well as increases realism (using up your whole stamina bar in around 20 seconds didn't feel very real). In addition to that, should you completely deplete your stamina, you will now have to wait until it has regenerated to at least 50% to be able to sprint again, so watch your stamina bar carefully! The last gameplay change that I have made is to significantly increase the length of time that it takes for your cold bar to refill once you're back in the warm, also in the name of increasing realism somewhat, as warming up from hypothermia to completely warm within 2 hours whilst the feels like temperature is only 1 degree didn't feel great. Of course, the new regen times do scale with felt temperature, so if you manage to achieve a feels like of 15 degrees you'll warm up just as fast as you used to.
Despite these changes and the new content, this update is not quite as substantial as I had hoped for. As many of you know, while Into the Wild is a passion project of mine, it is also my project work for my masters degree. Being work for my degree comes with the inherent problem of having deadlines that can't be missed, and it prevents me from pushing back the release date of the game by any significant margin. Honestly, this deadline looming over me has been the cause of quite a few headaches on my end throughout Into the Wild's development, but of course it was always going to be the content towards the end of development that suffered the most, and in this case it's dialogue that's got the short end of the stick.
So, what does this mean for Into the Wild's dialogue? Well, it's meant that I've had to cut a lot of dialogue that I recorded months ago, but haven't had the time to implement into the game. When I started working on the dialogue, I split it into 3 sections; states, reactions and story. States are the dialogue lines that are heard when your character has a certain need depleted (like complaining about being cold), reactions are when your character directly reacts to something (like the weather changing), whilst story voice lines are all of the ones that are triggered by visiting a certain location or finding a certain object which help to flesh out the story being told throughout Into the Wild. Unfortunately, it's the story voice lines that had to be cut, which means right now Into the Wild has only the voice lines for states and reactions. This isn't a decision I took lightly, and it certainly isn't because I didn't feel that the story voice lines weren't important, the decision came down to me accessing which voice lines would take me the most time to implement, and the story voice lines came up as needing the most work. Of course I do plan to add this cut content into the game post release, but we're probably not gonna see the story voice lines in the game until September/October.
Cutting content is always something I've really tried to avoid through development, which has had me frequently working 10-12 hours a day for all 7 days of the week getting stuff done, but there really just wasn't a way for me to get every single piece of dialogue that was recorded into the game in addition to finishing the rest of the music that's going into the game and doing my final bug fixing before the release date in August. It's always been my philosophy that it's better to have less content that is of a better quality, and there was no practical way for me to implement every voice line in a way that I felt was up to the same standard as the rest of the game.
But anyways, enough of that. I hope you all didn't mind reading my essay about what's going behind the scenes for me as a developer, as I've always felt it important that developers are open and upfront about their reasoning for making certain decisions and explaining why certain content may have been cut or not implemented in the way it was intended.
And on that bittersweet note, I hope you appreciate having your character complain about the results of your choices! Next on the list for me to be getting on with is finishing up the last of the music for the game, as I have A LOT of pieces that are sitting half way done just waiting for me to finish them and get them implemented!
Enjoy the update!
Seph