This may be an unpopular opinion.. especially as you’re pretty far into making the overworld levelmap- but I could imagine seeing Leila maybe benefitting from having hubworlds in 2D platforming style over the classic super mario overworld level map. Level maps are just so... dated for this genre?

Loving the rest of the game though

I like the idea of hub worlds, but almost never the execution. Both hubs and overworld maps are just gameplay versions of a level select menu, but hub worlds are far easier to get wrong as you run the risk of them feeling boring or convoluted.

I'd argue SM64 is the pinnacle of hub worlds, but even that series had a gradual decline before they just got rid of them entirely

Really, really love how detailed your dev log is. Always good to see your process.

Definitely watching this one

[Areas of Exploration]

It’s been too long, villagers, and that’s entirely my fault.

I mentioned last month that I was being unusually productive, and that has continued into March. This is, of course, a good thing!

However, the downside with being a one man operation is that when you’re productive in one area you tend to the let the others stagnate.

I’ve tried (and failed) at many different approaches to balance dev and social since the Kickstarter completed, and it’s time to admit it’s just never worked. So! I’m going back to the old style that I know worked for me and for you: weekly updates that focus on the three most interesting things I worked on that week.

Enough preamble! Let’s get back to it.

Areas of Exploration
The area outside the village has been receiving several design passes in an attempt to make it more diverse and interesting to explore. Let’s take a mini world tour to look at some of the areas you’ll be able to visit.

Here we have the Memorial Meadows, a somber area that houses grave stones, memorials, and other monuments to death. Parts of it are carpeted in flowers and overgrowth, and it’s overall a very peaceful place… albeit a disquieting one.

These are the Agrarian Acres, a large plot of arable land just outside the village. The farm provides food for everyone, and as you establish your reputation in the village they’ll allow you to use some of these fertile fields to your own benefit.

The Acres will also be an key area for folks that are interested in critter catching, collecting, and training. More on that later!

The forest outside of the village has been expanded. It is now known as Firetree Forest, and it stretches far to the north and south. Northern Firetree is currently inaccessible due to a bridge that burned down, but perhaps there’s another way…?

Personality & Flavor
A great many things have been locked down in the last month: the areas you can explore, villagers you can meet, activities to do, and so on.

Now that the world is a bit more concrete it’s allowed me greater flexibility in adding flavor and personality.

Many villager homes are now properly furnished and decorated. This’ll still change continuously as I add more furniture and decor to the game, but it’s already a large improvement over the mostly empty homes they’ve had to endure in the past.

The effort to write villager dialog has been going splendidly, especially as it relates to contextual dialog. You can expect villagers to comment on the weather, time of day, holidays, recent events and exploits, and much more.

The village has enjoyed addition levels of polish and detail to each of its districts. Here we can see the civics district, home to the town hall, event plaza, traveling merchants & visitors, and much more.

A Novella of Dialog
Sometime toward the end of February the Village Monsters script reached 18,000 words. I’ve since stopped counting because at some point the answer is the same: there’s a lot of words here.

Not all of it is implemented into the game, and most of it won’t be encountered by folks just playing the demo.

Still, this is a major part of the work left to do on the game, and I’m thrilled with the amount of progress I’ve made on it.

At the risk of promising too much, I think you’ll be extremely happy with how dialogue is handled in Village Monsters compared to other life sim games. I’m going to great lengths to ensure dialog comes across as natural, immersive, and avoids common pitfalls such as coming across as repetitive or generic.

I’m very happy to go back to these weekly updates, so I’ll see you all next time <3

that fast bouncing maroon dude is my favorite.

I like it! Short and sweet, just like your game.

I bought it at launch but still haven't gotten around to playing it (sorry...), but I really should!

I'm a day late, but Happy 1 Year Anniversary, Breath of the Wild. You are literally the perfect game

Very pleased by this trend of 3D pixel-y games. Looks rad

Not sure about that highlight as it's pretty large

I really enjoy iterating over systems, and there's always value in improving what you have vs. making something new

...but sometimes it makes sense just to nuke a system altogether. And that's what I've done regarding my fishing minigame.

My early idea was something along the lines of Breath of Fire - fishing would take you into a minigame of sorts, and you'd be able to catch as many fish as you wanted in a single session. Catching a fish would be a balance between line tension and fish stamina

But it just wasn't working. Worse, this design clashed with a lot of my other goals; i was making this world that strives to feel alive with weather cycles and animals running around and villager schedules, and then I was covering it all up with a minigame screen. Very silly!

I don't have a new solution in place yet, but I'm going to stop overthinking it and instead mimic fishing you can find in other games of my genre: you toss your line, wait for a bite, and try to time it correctly. I will likely have some kind of "struggle" mechanic after you hook a fish, but it'll be very lightweight. We'll see how it goes

Thanks for keeping up updated. It's painful to kill a project, but it's way more merciful than letting it linger on when you don't have the passion for it

Hope you put up a devlog for your next project

It's really jarring to see screenshots mixed in with the occasional smut. Not against it, but you seem to be leaning hard into visual novel territory which your in-game shots definitely don't hint at!

Yeah, that's a good way of phrasing it. I'm aiming for a system that's a blend of emergent and structured. Meaning, the topics themselves are 'random' - or, more accurately, I don't dictate them - but the conversations within a topic are ordered.

This gives me the freedom to have a conversations that feels emergent and contextual while also being able to write evolving stories without fear that dialog can happen 'out of order'

I like that the game tells you strawberries are worthless. In fact, Celeste does a fantastic job at frequently 'talking' to the player - and in plain english! - about itself and its mechanics. That's a surprisingly rare things in games, and I wish more did it.

I haven't played a game like Jumper since the original Flash games, so playing this was like a revelation to me. The moment I saw the double jump refreshers I felt transported back to 200x when I played Jumper on my dad's laptop

Since then I've cooled on it, but it's a very solid 4 star game, and the most interesting story in a platformer since Braid

You really love Bulwark, huh?!

For some reason I think "Beta Bulwark" is a lot of fun to say, so what about Hyper Beta Bulwark? Fun to say and fits with your aesthetic

This is a very cute looking game, but I'm having trouble understanding how the gameplay works. Do you have any in-game shots or clips?

Lately I've been writing a lot of dialog. Like, just a ridiculous amount of dialog.

I want to talk a bit about the tool I built to make it. Maybe this'll help one of you guys!

Before I built my own tool I looked at what others have used. If you've done the same then we've probably seen the same tools - Scrivener, articy draft, even Evernote.

None of them worked for me. For one, they were clearly meant for professional writers and for writing more 'traditional' story structures - first you say Dialog A, which leads to Dialog B, then branches to Dialog C1 or Dialog C2, and so on.

I'm not a professional writers, and Village Monsters isn't a game that values this kind of structured dialog. The player may talk to every villager every day, or they may never talk to them, and there are a seemingly infinite amount of possibilities in between

For my game, contextual conversations were much more important; I want villager conversations to reflect the current state of the world. If it's raining, they should talk about rain. If a big story beat happened, they should talk about that. And so on.

All this lead me to developing a dialog system of categories, topics, and tags. To create this, I used a tool I was intimately familiar with from my office days - Excel

I won't dive into huge detail for each column, because that'd be pretty boring, but here are the key points:

- Each set of dialog gets its own ID in case I need to reference it later

- Each is categorized by its main topic - General, Weather, Tutorial, Seasonal, Story, etc. This is used by the code to serve up the correct topics of conversation depending on the game world

- Each gets a series of tags. These are just for my benefit. For example, "Defining" means this particular conversation is a defining one for speaker's personality (in this case, a socially awkward mimic merchant that doesn't like his job)

Tags also help manage changes to the world. For example, if I have a character talk about another character I make sure to add them as a tag. That way if the character changes in a substantial way I can filter by tag and make sure each conversation about them makes sense.

- Finally, the last 3 columns are for implementation purposes. The Count is a character count to ensure a specific chunk of dialog isn't too rambling. The Status is whether it's a draft, implemented, or polished line. And the Formatted column spits out a GameMaker-friendly version of the line which allows me to copy / paste it right where I want it

In short, this system works really well for me and my requirements. In reality this is just the foundation with which I built something a lot more interesting - a dialog engine that can serve up conversations in an intelligent way - but that's something for a later day!

Hah, love it. Some of my favorite enemy types in SMW are the ones that can terrorize the world and other enemies, like the little koopa that kicks shells.

The world needs more monster games, and I really love the dynamic breeding stuff. I was following this back when it was just Crowns, happy to follow this new topic, too

How are you liking the "themed month" approach to your development? I thought of doing something similar, but I could never stay dedicated to it. I try to at least do themed weeks, but even then I'm all over the place most of the time

It really works for me personally. Given the amount of time I get to work on the game, spending a month on one task seems a good balance between feeling like I can focus on that area of the game, and not feeling like I'm spending *too* long on it. Placing the one month restriction on myself feels quite freeing in a way, because I don't have to worry about or feel guilty about other areas of the game. For example I could spend time on some small world map features like the destroyable blocks, without worrying about whether I would be better off working on level design or fixing bugs or something.

I do get distracted sometimes, it depends whether something grabs my attention (like how I got sidetracked with adding the gameplay recording thing a few weeks ago), but that's ok. I try to stick to the monthly plan but there's no point being hard on myself if I stray from it a bit.

Is this a part time project? It seriously looks absolutely excellent. Tons of love.

Lotta new users today. Welcome! Go make games

I hope you're pumped, dude, because I am.

Always a fun feeling knocking out a gamebreaker this close to the finish line. I had a release once where it was super stable and clean days before, so I decided to do some experimentation with a few systems, and ended up releasing a crash-ridden monstrosity (but not the good kind) instead. I won't be making that mistake again