Hey, the day has come and Critter Quest is now on the store!
The game is complete, to some degree, and should be interesting to test out -- but it's undergoing some overhauls that are going to be arriving soon.
I started working on a new roster of creatures, so the names of the creatures are going to change soon, and their bodies as well. I started working on improving the critter system, and the new creatures are not quite finalized yet.
I did improvements to many of the body components in a higher quality "mascot-style" or "cartoonish" look to them, here's a couple examples of what the new ones will look like:
There are added effects now, which need to be balanced, I've got new advanced graphics settings and got the framerate decent (and fully configurable) with the new critter system, but I did this redo very recent (couple days ago) and it might be a couple days until I roll it out. I figured we might as well launch now, so you can at least see the gen 1 critters right now, the exact same ones will automatically become the new ones when this is finished (the will share the same dexID).
Also, I will add soon drastically redo the game's interface (the game player design), that will come with the gen2 upgrade together. The current one was meant to be somewhat of a placeholder, but got in too deep with the critter redesigns that it still is there. It's meant to be a little mini key-chain version of a game, not a standard full-screen gaming experience but something you could leave idling and it has some function to it, but you could also actually play the game and it should all work and be fun. I might even make the world map / interacting with the world a more in-depth experience, but it should be kinda fun at least in it's current state.
There are Steam inventory items, I am leaving them unmarketable until the names are finalized, then (in theory) it would spawn the market page URLs correctly, I think I can edit their names until market listings exist. I was having an issue with item visibility, it was hard to get the items to appear on the non-developer accounts so I think by releasing in full right now, we will have proper visibility in the inventory and it will help diagnose and improve upon this system. I set it to force you to have the inventory system working properly before you can even play, so in theory the game (and it's items) are playable.
You can upgrade your critters with their levels, and it should update their Level on the item! They also spawn with genetic traits. There is a crafting system, to evolve the creatures, if you merge 5 together you should be able to craft them into an evolved form.
Getting the Steam items working is a bit tricky for how I wanted to create the system, so what I have done is make it so you need to encapsulate the critters inside of Capsules, and this way the crafting mechanic trades a Capsule for a critter, and it should satisfy the technical requirements of creating the item. I set it to give everyone a decent supply of them to start, and the game will drop more as you play, you should be ready to go with thousands of them to start with. It's possibly going to be a bottlenecking mechanism to prevent over-ambitious critter-catchers, I don't want it to slow down normal gameplay though.
Anyways, I have created this big green Control Center application, which can manipulate and edit any of the game's systems, from the map the music, all in a custom made interface. The animated Steam inventory items are generated in bulk by the programs, so when I make edits to the creatures' bodies they get updated automatically by my program, so you don't have to wait around for me to draw all of these critters, it's all hooked up together.
There is a working fishing mechanic to fish for encounters, and there is a giant underground world which is procedurally-generated and unique to your playthrough. You won't be able to see your game's seed (version) of the underground world until you have beaten the game, so it should be an interesting post-game experience. Still need to work on it a bit, and the NPC characters are still a bit awful-looking, but they will get upgraded to this new art style / creative vision I have going on here.
Anyways thanks for checking out my game, I've been working hard at it and it might be a buggy mess at the moment but I think it will soon shine a bit brighter with these new characters & redesign of the critters. If anyone has any desire to help with the designing of the critters, let me know and I could wire together some kind of interface for that.
Cheers! 🐾
Stay tuned for updates and be sure to follow the page!