This Week in the Forest! #189

YO FOLKS! Hope y'all have been well! Here's what we've been up to this week!

Starting with a Word from Vixel!

Actually, I'll summarize for him. The last couple weeks he's been prepping the next build, which involves a lil new ui shenanigans, and a bit of a treasure hunt! We'll have builds ready in the next day or so. Keep an eye out :>

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On my end, I've been pushing ahead with some of the final illustrations. I'm only gonna share a lil tiny snippet since there's kinda big spoilers x). I had the characters drawn out a while back, but I wasn't super happy with how the general compositions were. Like the characters positions/poses was great, but the background and lighting shenanigans wasn't quite coming together, especially with a bunch of characters.

But over the past week and a half I really flipped those illustrations around and started playing with the layout and lighting. Now they're really coming together, I'm super stoked! 4/6 of the images are in a really good spot. This is the 5th, and it's about 90% there. And I still need to do the 1st, which is likely gonna be the easiest one.

With that out of the way, I'll be able to plan out how the ending credits will go :O! Which means I'll need to reach out to EVERYONE WHO HAS EVER PLEDGED and send a "Would you like your name included in the credits?" - I'll have to figure out a good system for that.

I do still need to finish the final animations. There's a good amount of work that needs to be done there, but shouldn't be too bad. That said, we need to get all of this IN the game still, and that's going to be a process. Vixel's got his work cut out for him.

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Earlier today we did our weekly game dev call, and this time we brainstormed a ton of new UI stuff. I've been kinda doing a deep dive on UI/UX over the past week, and wanted to start incorporating some stuff into TFOL UI.

TFOL's UI has always been "serviceable" - but as things have grown, or just as we've seen them be used, it's been clear we need an upgrade. Over the past few years I've had random doodles and studies to figure out what might be good, but I think NOW we're really cooking! I'm really excited for the future Critter log. We'll be putting a lot more attention into it and the unlockables, it's gonna be a really nice part of the game :>

We've also paved the way for some future mini-game UI with these sorts of studies/UI deep dives. So I'm super stoked for y'all to see what we've got cookin!

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OOH. I also started the process on the manufacturing of the custom mabel bags! I had some folks who were going to do them for me, but they are really dragging their heels, so I had to look elsewhere. Fortunately the manufacturers of the Mabel toy are also able to make the bags :>! And at a WAY better price than the other place xD

I'll share some visuals on that a lil' later. Once everything is for sure a-go on it!

That's it for now. I'm going to start the next 3D animation poll. Keep an eye out folks!