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[Josh Bossie]

I hope it all works out!

Same here, good luck! Your game is super charming I basically just need a pocket horse in my life okay

oh I missed this yesterday - thanks, duders! I'll be sure to have a $100k stretch goal to genetically engineer pocket horses for us all

[Josh Bossie]

Hello monster friends!

It's the weekend, and that means another edition of the Village Monsters Dev Diary Digest (VMD3)

The marathon continues! This past week saw the release of the latest demo, and it was a big one.

www.warpdogs.com/wererelease/

I want to thank all the people who took the time to share feedback! You are making Village Monsters a better game. You can expect another release tomorrow that contains more features and bugfixes reported via feedback

The Kickstarter is coming soon. Real soon. As in, in the next 48 hours! I'm so pumped. And nervous. Mostly pumped!

As with last week I'm going to keep the text at a minimum and make this a screenshot blitz. Let's get to it

I did a fair amount of work on the last hobby prototype, Cooking. It's far from where I want it, but it'll improve over time

Remember the potion system? I went and combined it with food effects to open the door for all sorts of goofy fun. Snowberry Shrooms now properly chill you to the bone, while Spicy Shrooms put an extra kick in your step

A new area, the forest, has been implemented. This is also your first chance to investigate some of the glitches and faults ruining the world outside the village

The first of many quests have been added - meet all villagers in town! There's no reward for finding them all (yet...), but it's a good way to track your progress

Finally, more helper text has been added to Home Customizer mode. You also are automatically placed in this mode when placing a new piece of furniture

[breakfastbat]

Holy cow, the Kickstarter is tomorrow already! I'll be at work most of the day but I'm excited to check it out when I get home.

[Josh Bossie]

Hey guys, another quick patch went up tonight in advance of tomorrow's Kickstarter campaign.

Like Alpha 1.01 it's a small patch, but it contains many more changes and even a couple new features, so it's worth checking out if you haven't exhausted the previous demo yet.

You can grab it and read the patch notes right here

[Josh Bossie]

Oh, hello! Village Monsters is now officially on Kickstarter!

Come, help me build a village! Back Village Monsters on Kickstarter!

[Pixel Noise]

YAASSSSSS good luck Josh! I think you better get some stretch goals ready

[Josh Bossie]

Haha, thanks! There's still a loooong way to go, but I've been absolutely blown away by the support so far.

The campaign reached 10% funding this evening, which is still just so absurd to me. Thank you to everyone that's backed so far!!

[Josh Bossie]

Phew, what a whirlwind the last 36 hours have been. I'm not exactly sure how much sleep I've grabbed since this thing launched, but it's surely not a lot

Hopefully I'm not being too annoying spamming this, but I'd be remiss not to include a link to the Kickstarter at the top of this post

A few notes!

• I am super insanely happy to report the game has reached the 20% funding mark! There's still plenty of campaign left, but I cannot even properly express how much gratitude I feel toward people that have backed already. Thank you!!!
• A number of tiers have sold out already, but the Early Bird tier - where you can grab the game for $12 - still has ~60 slots
• Today I also added an additional reward I'm calling Village Younger. The Village Elder tier - the reward that allowed you to design your own monster - sold out very quickly on the first day. This new tier is identical to Elder with one difference: the monster you design will be added to the game after launch. This is so that we have enough time to design and create a really cool monster without impacting the overall schedule of the game

Things will most likely slow down from here on out if previous Kickstarters are any indication. I'm actually ok with that, as I'll use the 'downtime' to resume working on the game. I'm hoping to get out several new releases between now and the end of the Kickstarter, though of course they'll be smaller in size than the previous bi-monthly demos.

Thanks as always for following along!

[Josh Bossie]

The whirlwind rages on.

It's stressful, sure, but there's also something fun about running around like your hair is on fire - it makes the days feel a lot more productive

I'm foregoing the typical weekend digest this week because a) I don't have time, and b) I didn't really do a whole lot on the game this week/ Still, I do have a few things to chat about, so let's make like a gun and bullet.

Oh, and again, I'd be silly to not link to the Kickstarter at the top of the post! If you like what you see in this topic and want to support me, then please consider sharing or making a pledge.

Regarding Kickstarter...

• Early this afternoon I crossed the 30% funded mark, which is a tremendous milestone. Thank you to everyone who has backed the campaign! Your support has given me so much motivation.
  
• The Early Bird tier is just about sold out - as of writing this there's only ~15 slots left. Act fast if you want to get the game at the lowest possible price
  
• The newly introduced Village Younger tier has slots left as well. If you're interested in a monster of your design being added to the cast of Village Monsters then please take a look
  
• I've started posting longer looks at the various systems and features of Village Monsters on Kickstarter. The latest one is on the Mysteries system. They're view-able by anyone - no backing required

Regarding the Game...

• Another Alpha 1 released today. You can grab it right here. Alpha 1.03 brings with it some more bug fixes, but more importantly it's the first demo that includes Linux support! You'll see a separate link on the Downloads page for Linux. I haven't forgotten about you, Mac - it's just a lot harder to get you up and running on Virtual Box
  
• Alpha 1.03 also re-implements the ability to swap your gender - a much requested feature
• Finally, Alpha 1.03 makes it a bit easier to send feedback. It seems some people were having some issues, as my inbox has been full of feedback emails that look like the below. That should hopefully now be fixed

Well, that'll do it for now. Hopefully this coming week is a bit slower, as I'll be able to get more done on the game - including more dev streams!

[Josh Bossie]

So, I realized today that I don't utilize this topic for feedback nearly as much as I should. I'm going to try and change that - starting right now.

I'm in the process of reworking my title screen, though it'll be used for even more than that (like the top of posts, the Kickstarter, and so on)

My original idea, seen here,


(those 'glitches' are on purpose, and are meant to be a hint of things to come)

was the first draft of a concept that I never really finished. It looked fine enough for a 1st iteration and I just left it alone.

I've grown increasingly disappointed in it, though. It doesn't really capture what my game is about. It's not whimsical. There's no monsters. It's simple, but in a forgettable way.

So here's a WIP version of a new title.



Bright colors, trees to represent the seasons, weather that changes, and monsters being goofy.

What do you think? Better, or worse, than the original?

[Pixel Noise]

I think this is a better direction, and I think I saw a version of this on twitter which may have differed from this one. That one had a whole group of characters lined up. It would be SUPER cool if you could script various characters to walk through/peek out/whatever on the Title screen, like the one you have peeking out on the left side now at the start of the graphic. That would give it a lot of life. Barring that, I'd like to see the group of characters I think.

[Josh Bossie]

Yeah, I'll definitely include more monsters and critters. The more I iterate over this the more I realize it could be like one of those ant farms screensavers from the 90s

I adjusted the shadow a bit and I'm probably done with it now. This type of work reminds me of UI work - eg., it can really drive me crazy.

[Josh Bossie]

Working on some gardening this week.



In the future growing things will be a bit more involved than "plant, water, wait", but this'll do for now

There are currently 9 garden crops available to grow, and I plan to at least double that before the next Alpha release.

[Josh Bossie]

Hey all!

I put up a new demo today, which you can grab right here -

http://warpdogs.com/were-release/

It includes the aforementioned gardening changes + lots of big fixes and improvements.

I also revamped the in-game feedback system so it's a lot easier to submit feedback + get a response back if you want one!

[Josh Bossie]

This whole Kickstarter thing has been fun, but boy I'll be glad to get back to full time development. Feels like I barely get anything done these days.

Anyway, lately I've been working on UI. The Compendium has been renamed to the Journal, and I've been fleshing out specific sections. When I'm done you'll be able to open up the Villagers section and read profiles and other tidbits about each villager

Beyond that, I've also been working on improving creature behaviors. I'm trying to go the "simpler changes are better" route instead of reinventing radiant AI or whatever. For example, a creature may spawn with a 'desired object' - maybe a specific type of tree, food, etc., and instead of moving randomly it'll find its way to its desired object. It adds a bit more intelligence to the critter and looks better than randomly picking a direction

Finally I'm reimplementing my old prototypes for "glitch powers". I've been pretty quiet about these, but I plan to have a big ol' Kickstarter update detailing how they work early next week

Sorry for the unusually pictureless post. In ~12 days (!!) the campaign will end and I'll be back to normal

[Josh Bossie]

I'm working on some cool things this week. I think have one more demo in me before the Kickstarter ends, and I'm going to make it a big one.

Here's are the things I'm cooking in the oven!

First up - the town has time traveled to autumn!

Of course, the timescale in the game is not based on real time, but I was feeling so autumn-y that I had to get my spook on. You'll find a new tileset, plenty of spooky decorations and creatures, and even new music!

Next, I'm re-implementing + giving more love to some of the Glitch Powers in the game. Meet the new-and-improved Buzzsaw Bug Net. I'm hoping to have a post up later on that dives how exactly Glitch Powers work

This is something I've promised to do for awhile, but it ended up being a lot harder to implement than I had planned

The game now officially has better diversity. You can't choose your appearance right now (on account of me being real bad at UI), but when you start the game you'll be randomly assigned one of 6 sprites.

(Of course in the final game you'll have full control)

Finally, I'm showing the Compendium even more love - as I mentioned before, it's been renamed to the Journal. It has new pages, better controls, and is overall getting more useful

I've also done a flurry of bugfixing: A crash related to surface lighting has been fixed, plenty of collision / layering issues have been fixed, critters are a bit more sensible, and lots more.

The current plan is to keep tossing new features and ideas and release the demo by Saturday

As an aside, I also put together a Thunderclap for my Kickstarter. If you're looking for an easy way to support my project, then I'd really love for you to opt in!

[Josh Bossie]

Man, I am up super late tonight. I hope the Kickstarter ending brings me back to a normal sleep schedule

Anyway, sometime tomorrow (today?) I hope to put up the final demo release of October. I'm going all out with this one as eluded to in my previous post

As you can see from my Kickstarter itself, I'm going to need some help in these final days. If you've read this topic or played the demo and have enjoyed it, then it'd seriously mean the world to me if you could support or share the campaign.

[Josh Bossie]

Here's the last demo of the Kickstarter - Alpha 1.06, "Spooky Edition"

As I mentioned in my last post, it includes a time jump to the fall and includes a bunch of other changes and fixes. You can grab the game and look at the patch notes right here.

Speaking of the Kickstarter, there's just 24 hours remaining and I'm going to need some sort of hail mary. I've watched enough football to know those can actually happen, so I haven't given up quite yet. Please consider backing or sharing if this game interests you!

[thefoolishbrave]

Here's the last demo of the Kickstarter - Alpha 1.06, "Spooky Edition"

As I mentioned in my last post, it includes a time jump to the fall and includes a bunch of other changes and fixes. You can grab the game and look at the patch notes right here.

Speaking of the Kickstarter, there's just 24 hours remaining and I'm going to need some sort of hail mary. I've watched enough football to know those can actually happen, so I haven't given up quite yet. Please consider backing or sharing if this game interests you!

Hey Josh, I gave you a boost on my social channels and I also dropped you a line in your inbox! Best of luck! I've failed 2 Kickstarters, it's hard to do, and I think we've obviously been hurt a lot by big names that haven't delivered or, produced sub par products with millions (lookin' at you mighty no.9), if it doesn't go your way, don't give up on your game but i'm rooting for you!

[Pixel Noise]

Can you e-mail various news outlets and see if they'll throw you a plug?  I'd also tap into Reddit, if you haven't already. Get into the r/gaming or indiegaming - any applicable forum where they'll allow you to post about it. Of course I'll be plugging you on twitter the whole time!