March Devlog!

I doubt you need any reminders about what a crazy month it’s been, so I’ll just say I hope you're taking care of yourself <3 Let’s get started!

🎮 PAX East

I wrote a much more extensive recap of our PAX East experience in this post, but since that was patron-only, I thought I’d mention it here as well. I also have some new pictures courtesy of Indie MEGABOOTH!

As an indie developer who spends most of their time in a home office (literally) without windows, I can’t overstate how invigorating PAX East was. At first I was intimidated by the sheer scale of the event, but by the end of the first day James and I had settled in. Seeing new players enjoy Rolling Hills and meeting supportive, endlessly talented developers was an experience I’ll cherish forever. I sincerely hope we can go to more PAX events in the future.

🏠 Home Sweet Home

A cozy place to call home is an essential part of any life-sim, and that includes Rolling Hills. Although our focus is on customizing the restaurant and growing your business, it’s also important that the player can make a home of their own. For the sake of versatility, any piece of furniture that can be placed in the restaurant can also be placed in the home, so perhaps an item will get retired from the sushi shop and make its way to your bedroom and vice versa. The bottom line is that it’ll be up to you to decorate both to your heart's content!

🤖 Robots...

It wouldn’t be a proper devlog without mentioning Sushi Bot! I’d like to use the bot as a vehicle to talk about the careful balance between simplicity and depth in Rolling Hills.

As I’ve mentioned before, Rolling Hills is the first time we’ve developed a game publicly. That means a lot of things, but the most obvious is that we get a constant stream of feedback. Demoing the game at PAX East was particularly insightful since it was the first time players were able to interact with Sushi Bot. 

It made me happy to see that these interactions were intuitive and fun for players, and because this iteration of Sushi Bot was still on the basic side, a few players even pitched ideas for how they would expand its gameplay. These are really fun conversations to have. We toss ideas back and forth and our excitement for the game grows. Watching a player’s face when you talk about a feature that genuinely excites them is pure magic.

It’s important to remember, though, that everyone comes to your game with a slightly different mindset.  For instance, “hardcore” (for lack of a better term) players would pitch complex, in depth mechanics for Sushi Bot. They asked me to consider adding lots of control, like the ability to program detailed routines. These are features that are exciting to consider, but make more casual players (like me) feel intimidated. Creating mechanics with enough depth to be entertaining for 30+ hours without becoming overly complicated is a challenge, but it’s also just part of being a designer. Without these problems, my job would be pointless! (So, um... thank you, problems!)

🎣 ...and fishes...

Just because I consider myself a more casual player doesn’t mean my instincts are always right for Rolling Hills. Let’s use fishing as an example for another balancing act: relaxing vs. exciting. If we developed in a vacuum, based solely on our own preferences, our fishing would closely resemble Stardew Valley. In my opinion, it’s perfect: it’s challenging but rewarding, and the mechanics mimic the tension and excitement of reeling in a fish… but then we polled our community! Absolutely no one preferred Stardew Valley’s fishing mechanics over games like Animal Crossing and Minecraft. Many said that they preferred games where fishing was a zen-like experience and Stardew was simply too action-focused and difficult to achieve that sensation.

I’m not ready to spoil all of our plans for Sushi Bot or fishing yet, but I hope you find it as interesting as I do to hear what players think. As I already alluded to, coming up with creative solutions to mend these gaps is one of my favorite parts of being a game designer. Perhaps even as you read this you’ll come up with some solutions of your own!

👨‍👩‍👦 ...and humans, too!

Lastly, I want to talk about some additions to the cast of Rolling Hills. Many of you know that as you perform good deeds, you’ll accumulate a currency called JOY. You can do many things with JOY, and that includes unlocking collectable customers (or VIPs, as we call them). These customers are all unique and each one brings a distinct advantage to Rolling Hills. For instance, having the Angler in your town will make fish easier to catch. For a while now, these unlockable characters have been the only non-animal residents in Rolling Hills. That’s about to change!

We’re in the process of creating new human characters who live and work in Rolling Hills, right from the start. These characters will perform a variety of tasks needed for our gameplay (running shops, constructing public works, etc), which will give our animals even more freedom to roam and help establish a world where humans and animals live in harmony. Please look forward to these characters as they are likely to play a big ‘roll’ in the game!

❤️ Thank you for supporting us!

I can never say it enough, but thank you sincerely to everyone who supports Rolling Hills! In case you missed it, we have a Steam page now where you can wishlist the game. Wishlists are surprisingly meaningful to developers and publishers, so please give it a click if you don’t mind.

It’s not lost on me that money is tight for a lot of people right now, so to the patrons specifically, thank you so much!