Hey!
Justin here
As this hot summer comes to an end, it's about time to let you know how this game's development has been going!
This season, we've been narrow focused on getting our first good hour of the game out for you cool folks to try sometime soon (I won't tell you when exactly, it's a secret 😉). What I can tell you though is that in this first slice you'll be challenged to sell off liquor in a desperate Fish Town right after the fallout of a anomalous meteor shower. Suddenly your home is ice and no one is prepared... including the government.
In the past months we've been busy constructing locations in Fish Town (4 if you're curious), designing and writing characters, developing audio (including a soundtrack!), and overall improving Wildflower's systems. Come! Peruse around below for a peek of the progress.
Constructing Locations
A rant on asset creation and what we've learned: We thought we knew everything about creating our locations back in June, BOY were we wrong!! Originally we would create all of our visuals via the software Procreate; this included 3D models. Now if you've tried texturing 3D models in Procreate before you might know how... uhhh... we'll say inconvenient?... the experience is. For the lucky folks who haven't had the experience, Procreate "locks" all textures to one single resolution; 'you have a small crate? 2k resolution. you have a massive storage building? 2k resolution'. This is just one of the insane issues with the software we had to work around, which meant we had to change our location asset pipeline if we wanted to get this done at a reasonable quality and time.
We had some soul searching to do, and gladly over the past months we've moved over to what we think is a much easier asset workflow! In general now we do all our 2D assets (like characters, smaller details, UI) still in Procreate and all our 3D models (like buildings, tables, bigger trees) in Blender and Krita. This has felt much better; being able to model and texture objects all in one software has made things smoother to iterate on, plus Godot's support for Blender is pretty strong and should be only be getting better (check out the game Dog Walk if you haven't yet!). Again I do want clarify that Procreate is also a great piece of software! Just it's best when you use it for 2D lest you want to loose your mind (which should only be happening in the game). Thank you for indulging me in that rant, and maybe it helps you figure out a good process too :)
This roof would've been almost impossible to make with our old asset pipeline
Now onto our progress.
Archer has been making some great art for our locations! All four locations for the first good hour exist and are in the process of being textured in! Still a lot of greyboxes, but gradually we're moving away from the landlord special to an expressive range of texture. The Market area was our first more built out location that got us really excited about the visuals; it actually convinced us to move over to using more shading.
Making locations also means designing items that fill up the space. The boats stuck in the dock may be my favorite!
Designing Characters
Characters are extra fun to make! Not so different to coming up with a TTRPG character; first there's research, then there's writing out an idea, and then there's iterating down to a final look. In each design it's important that we communicate the character's origin, current mood, and then... vibe. Vibe is actually quite a big deal, you just have to make sure that when you're talking about vibe that you don't go too far off into vagueness lol.
Groups need designs too. Here's what Fish Town's local police look like with a range of ranks represented.
Developing Audio
Now Wildflower's has some some environment and sound effects added! Every area on the continent is mapped out to an eco-region with set flora and fauna. That sort of care has also carried over into making sure we use environment sounds that would match the region. At Mele's home farm you can hear the croak of Green and Golden Bell Frogs in the farm.
On top of gathering some SFX libraries, we've also been recording some of our own effects! We weren't 100% happy with options we found online for some sounds, so why not make it ourselves? Just like with eco-regions, we want to keep you in the early pre-industrial 1800s setting of Wildflower's. No engines and no cliché medieval sword shiiiiing (which isn't even a real sound by the way!), we want sounds of dense wood, stone, and coins.
We also have the help of Clover-Lynn, who is developing music for Fish Town! Last month we got to listen to some in-progress pieces and man it gave me goosebumps. It's been fun to hear the result of mixing Fish Town's cultural influences with her style! More information to come when the music releases :)
Go check out Clover-Lynn here!
Improving Systems
The dialog system got quite the glow up! It's now significantly easier to add new dialog scenes (farewell old, clunky system that was way too hard to use). On top of all the small upgrades to the system, we also juiced it up with animations.
There's also now a stats/potentials UI we've been building! We're pretty proud about the visuals for it. UI that is unique and understandable improves a game's experience to us. We want to keep things interesting and avoid simple list formats for UI; you see it a lot so it should look good! Below is the physically made and painted tri-fold, which was then touched up digitally and added in.
One more highlight system-wise is the camera, OH MY GOSH the CAMERA. In playtesting, the placement of the camera was causing issues for players trying to move around the environment accurately. We decided to change the placement of the cameras (putting them higher up and having them look down helps a lot) and programmed the movement controls to better match the current camera angle you see. This and several smaller improvements have made the experience better. Honestly we don't think it's completely up to snuff yet, but gradually we're making it better :)
Thank You For Reading!
And that's it for now, thank you so much for reading!
We're eagerly working hard to get something out for folks to play, hopefully we can bring some more news on that soon 😉
If you do have any questions, we'd love to answer them! And if this article peaked your interest, a Follow or Wishlist goes a long way!
Until next time, have a great day!
-Justin and Archer
