Edengrall News

Yesterday was 11/11, so we made a quick demoday build, it is VERY glitchy, but you can play with the buildable furniture if you want, the kitchen utensils are working, but the Bed does nothing for now.



Links at the devblog

We already found some problems and are working on it. The NPCs are walking around, but their needs and jobs are not properly calibrated yet, and interactions with objects are a bit buggy, specially the animations.

While my brother is fixing glitches I started making the intro scene.

Adam will start the game with the common unconscious on the beach trope for now, we are planning different starts later on, but for now this will be the default.

There will be a very short cutscene to help guide the players during a new game, but we won’t make a handholding tutorial.



We have a lot to work on this month, we expanded our work hours to catch up with the backlog.

We are remaking the cooking utensils with the new art style for two reasons: First is to match the intended art style of the final game (drawn cartoony textures instead of realistic-looking materials), the second reason is a current limitation of our building system, each mesh must have a single material, so the previous Stove that had metal and wood materials now has a single material with everything on it, the problem is that this requires drawing all textures manually.



On release the available buildable furniture will be: Stove (Pan + Pot), Small Stove (Steamer), Oven, Grill, Sink (Raw Preparation), Fermenting Table, Vase (for small indoor crops) and a Bed (to sleep and speed up time), the new furniture are almost done code-wise, only thing needed is to allow them to be build on top of other building pieces, since right now they can only be placed on terrain, this and all the new textures should be done by next week.

We managed to speed up some coding stuff, but there is still a lot to do.

Our next focus will be allowing the player to sell any item to NPCs, instead of being forced to earn money through cooking quests.

AI progress and Functional Furniture



We are implementing the NPC jobs, starting with agriculture, NPCs can plant, irrigate and harvest crops, most jobs on release will be on the simple side, things like opening a shop (stands behind the counter and waits for the player to come buy stuff), there will more advanced jobs later on, like setting up festivals.

My brother is also implementing functional furniture like cooking utensils and a Bed, with this the player will be able to build a house and have some functionality within.



There are only two months for release, and we are running out of time, most of what is missing is code, so I started to help my brother implementing small things, but we still a bit worried, we had to cut a lot of stuff from the December release, but everything will be implemented eventually, as we plan to continue developing for many years after release.

we are finishing the responsibilities system, we now have hidden objects around the map (white cubes) indicating NPC job locations. The NPCs will move into these zones to do their jobs, each is configurated to a different job and one or more NPCs.



Making this is taking all of our development time, so there aren't any other features to show off right now, we expect to finish this in one or two weeks.



The map is now working, by pressing M you can see the general location of every NPC in real time, this will be useful for players trying to find certain NPCs.

Not much else to report right now, see you next week.

Yukari and Catarina have been imported, clothes are configured, hair has physics, the prefabs are basically done, but the appendices are still lacking animations (ears and tails), I will be making them today, then I will only need to fill the personality and properties xml files to add them to the game with AI components.



The Dwarf was also missing a few more things to be done, I think he needed an animation for his eyes/glasses, most of his animations will be based on Adam’s since they have similar rigs, I have to check my notes about it.



My brother is still working on the AI, NPCs now seek interactable objects to satisfy their needs (Beds for sleep, chairs for eating, etc…) they can now play an animation while using the interactable. Next step is to populate the responsibilities (jobs and tasks) and make household inventories, we want to have a functional economy by release.