Kobold Crossing

"A delayed game is eventually good, but a rushed game is forever bad." 

- a wise kobold

I've been looking at ways to give the Smol Kobold Garden world more style as I felt it was lacking a bit. I was also thinking of how the top down perspective has been used for so long in games. What are modern games doing to spice it up? Looking at how Animal Crossing warps the perspective to fit a sort of turning log world, I got to wondering if they made a new Animal Crossing, what would be the next evolution of the log be? Obviously not only warping on one side but both, warping the the world into a globe. So I curved the world just enough to where it looks like a globe and it felt right.

But this comes at the cost of some of the systems I built not working as they were made for a flat world, most notably the camera system. Not only that but I want to lean into the Animal Crossing style a bit more with the textures as Smol Kobold Garden would eventually have houses you can place and build upon for your bolds. This plus the curved world would give pretty hard Animal Crossing vibes and having things more stylized to it would be the icing on the cake. I feel Smol Kobold Garden has a pretty hard time with new players trying to understand what this game is even about, so if it looked more stylized and like Animal Crossing in a way, new players would have a better understanding of what it plays like just by looking at it.

The games systems weren't too hard to convert. The camera simply moves left and right, forward and back so to curve it you have a point that acts as the worlds "core" and use its position and rotation relative to the cameras to affect the cameras rotation, aligning it to the worlds surface when it moves. You can also use the cores position as the point for the worlds gravity so the physics objects like eggs point towards the core instead of pointing globally up and down.

This took a bit to implement but the most time consuming part was yet to come. Stylizing the current textures and models like trees and plants. I feel when these are done, it will give the word a more cohesive look and generally just look better. After this I swear I will not be adding more things until after it is released, thank you for your patience! This will all be worth it!