Hello again friends. I'm bringing possibly -hopefully- the 2nd to last monthly update before the new build, yay!

Even tho this month I worked mostly on already existing systems, there are some important things I wanna show.

First of all, regarding "the town", I want to introduce you to the Municipality of Santa Hedera :D

^Santa Hedera map introduced!^

I settled on Santa Hedera (Saint Hedera) as the name for the town, since not only I find it hedera a beautiful word, but also sounds realistic, going by naming conventions in small towns I know of. As the name implies, Santa Hedera was also a person, belonging to the Theanthropic Church, who was of course sanctified and whom was involved with the foundation of the town. Even though Most people just think of the city itself when they hear the name. Btw I need to make a statue of her so I can display front and center in the main plaza.

Hope you like the map, I worked hard on making it believable but also pretty :3

You'll see the black-gold theme very present in the UI.

Well, the first important issue regarding this month is finally solidifying Santa Hedera's structure. Even tho there will be some changes here and there, major landmarks and the overall layout is not gonna change much. So I hope I can give Santa Hedera a presence and personality of its own, since its gonna be the setting for, hopefully, many cool stories :D

A brief note about optimization...

The reason why I can finally fully commit on S.H. is that I finished a major part of the optimization system I had for showing the full town. I wasn't sure I would be able to pull it, but I did, so I'm happy I can have a somewhat big town. Not huge so to destroy your pc, but big enough to feel convincing.

Basically my setup is a custom LOD system, in which the closest buildings to the player are actual fully realized meshes, but the ones that are far from the player are just dummies that share one big, atlas texture that looks blurry and wonky seeing up close, but is perfectly fine from afar.

This is occlusion culling for buildings not on sight, pretty standard optimization technique paired with my dummies, gave me great performance.

I reckon I can still get more frameage using more and more lower LOD models for the dummies, but I'll leave that for after the next build.

New UI!

This is my new UI. As you can see I chose a black, bronze and gold color palette.

You can see me alternating between the map, inventory, delivery, and settings tabs using Q and E on the keyboard.

Shopping menu! Currently there's not a lot of items, but I'm working on filling out a nice list of many that have different RPG effects, and different story purposes.

The map itself is also navigable with WASD, as well as with dragging with the mouse.

Speaking of the map, there's an important change I need to talk about.

Introducing new game mechanic: Diegetic Navigation! :D

(AKA: in-world map/address based navigation)

In the spirit of making Santa Hedera more intimate, and cozy, as opposed to a big city in which you just follow icons telling you where to go, I'm making the whole city itself part of the gameplay!

So, before, I had navigation markers in the UI showing you where to go... well, I decided that the best idea was to have a different kind of navigation, taking a little bit of inspiration from Morrowind.

The idea is to use the map as an actual map, as in, you must orient yourself based on it, addresses, and on street signs.

How this works in practice is:

when you accept a new delivery, you are given 2 addresses, one belonging to the place you are picking it up from, and the other being the girl's address.

Then! You look for your destinations on your map, based on the street names!

You can know where you are by looking at nearby signs!

^ You can orient yourself very easily with intersections! ^

^ This will be one of many "You Are Here" kind of signs. ^

And finally once you get to her address, you can find her waiting for you!

You can finish the delivery by talking to her and giving her her delivery through your inventory!

Delivery done! yay!

I know this is a bit of an experimental gameplay mechanic... As I said, I've only seen this style of diegetic navigation in games like Morrowind, in which very often you must find your destination only based on what your character has written in his journal. Other game that has a strong emphasis on addresses is Shadows of Doubt, which I find oddly cozy... But outside of that, I can't think of many examples, since the current standard for games is following Icons on a map, or yellow paint, I suppose.

Well, I see this as a small and personal game challenge that fits Theanthria's atmosphere nicely. Very importantly, this serves for narrative purposes as well, since each girl has her own address, her own schedule, and in the future, her own story-line that involves both.

So this is the progress for September. Now, October is gonna be a strange month. I pretty much only have 3 goals for October: filling up the details on the delivery and conversations system, fixing game-crashing bugs, and make as many animations as I can... and then, assuming everything goes well, I can finally have a new build.

So, next update is possibly gonna be the last. Well last before a new build, after that... well I still will continue the devlogs, tho i reckon I will post more build updates than progress updates.

Well, if you are reading this, thank you for following this journey all the way through. I hope this is just the beginning of a new chapter in Theanthria's life. Regardless of what happens, I will still be here, as I have been all this time, and hopefully you too.

So, until the next, possibly final update, take care 🫂