This Week in the Forest! #76

YO FOLKS~! Here's what we've been up to this week!

Starting with a word from Vixel!

5/9 weekly update:

Happy new week, floofs! Last week I worked on cleaning up old spaghetti code in our Upgrade project, making various scripts react less breakably when their earlier assumptions are no longer true.

For example, if the the camera is following an object, and that object suddenly gets deleted, the camera scripts now adjust automatically without generating errors. This cuts down on all the code I used to write to manage camera transitions, since the camera now takes care of itself in most cases.

Cutscenes (moments when the game takes over and the player is locked out of their controls) are now mostly self-contained; the spawning system now allows them to spawn all their props, actors and interactions so they don't have to search the object list for stuff that may be missing or unavailable or controlled by other cutscenes. This once again cuts down on the code I previously had to write to handle all the possible scripts fighting for control.

The player can now be spawned and despawned. (Red used to be permanently spawned in every scene, which meant scripts had to fight over him constantly.) We can swap out different versions of Red to change his artwork, behaviors, etc. This also lets cutscenes have their own copy of Red for better control of his animations and movement, when needed.

I've now got one walkable area completely modularized with just background artwork permanent, and a spawner controlling everything else. This is super clean and means there's no clutter in the scene, and no room for bad assumptions that an object will or won't exist, guiding me to better design and coding practices.

This week I'll continue expanding these designs into the other areas. I'm going methodically from Act 1 to Act 3 reworking the 'gameplay' parts of our whole story since so many scripts follow new rules. It's a lot of work with a big payoff at the end. :) Boop yall soon!

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On my side I've been prepping more assets for Act 3 scenes! Like this one up above! If all goes well y'all will be able to see Melody's scene in the next build :> 

I've also made progress on last month's 10$+ Poll! It's extra content with Melody AND Charlotte since they both basically tied :> I'll prolly drop the visual next week!

I've also done a few new Patreon Critters, nothing finished yet, but sketched another few out.

OH! Y'all wanna see something fun? Kuroodod Took a fun lil' picture for us! Check it out!

SO EXCITING SEEING THIS! This is a Steam Deck, but it is the linux build. We still don't have our Steam page set up just yet, (I should really get on that lmao). But it's SO HECKIN COOL seeing this! Apparently it works pretty well out of the box with a bit of optimization issues here 'n there, so super cool news. Can't wait till I get mine!

Anywho that's about it for us! I've got a bunch more writing work to focus on the next week. 

We'll see y'all next time!