February 2023 Newsletter

As I sat down to write this newsletter, I knew it was going to be a tricky one to tackle. Last month I said I was dedicating more time to the main quest and story of the game, and that’s exactly what I’ve done. To the point that I’ve blocked out all the steps that will take the player through to the finale, and now I’m in a position to iterate on that.

The down-side for this, is that it doesn’t really give me material for the newsletter. The main quest is the one thing I haven't properly showed here or on social media - the reason being is I hope players can play with fresh eyes, with no preconception from seeing things on social media or trailers. Saying that - if you play the demo then you will get a very early idea of what might be going on.

Having the main quest in place is a great thing though, as it acts as the driving force for progression for the player. Every big and little thing you do in the game leads to knowledge that will help you on your way, whether it’s side-quests, reading books, finding notes and exploring the procedural areas. This also gets me one step closer to a potential early access version of the game.

So for this newsletter I’m going to focus on some of those little "side-things", as well as digging into my archives to really show how things have progressed since I started.



[h2]Tea Brewing Mini Game[/h2]



Quite soon after the demo section of the game, you'll encounter a new character by the name of Graham. Graham teaches you in the craft of brewing special tea, which can grant the player special temporary perks. You can think of this similarly to the cooking mechanic that I described in a previous newsletter.

The more I implement these features, the more I realise that this game really relies on discovery. Particularly with the cooking and brewing gameplay - a lot of the recipes you learn will either be found by experimentation, or finding recipe notes whilst you explore. This approach to things really is at the core of the game, and I think it's good that I'm leaning into it at every opportunity.

One thing I've been working on is a screen overlay effect which will help you find ingredients for brewing tea. You can think of this similar to the Witcher senses, and will highlight hidden resources in every area in the game that you can forage. This will highlight as purple as apposed to the typical gold for all other interactables.





[h2]Stoknel Swamp[/h2]

Stoknel Swamp is the third procedural zone you can explore in the game, and is designed to be one of the more dangerous locations, with even deadlier enemies to encounter. It's very early days so I can't show much, but there's enough here to give a glimpse. It was also another opportunity to jump into photo-mode and show off some of the filters I have implemented - including sepia-tone!







[h2]From the Archive[/h2]

I won’t spent much time setting things up here. Below are a few images I’ve dug up over the last 2 years of development. I’ll briefly describe what’s going on in each one!



One of the earliest screenshots I could find of a conversation test, with an insight to art styles I was attempting before going down the realistic assets route. You can see I'm even using the default Unreal Engine mannequin for the NPC's here!



A later screenshot of the conversation system, with an early look at the town. I'm using a basic screenshot of the Unreal Mannequin here as an NPC portrait, before finding an artist to help me out with those!



This is a test for a procedural zone, you can see that the lake formation doesn't look too natural especially around the edges. This was before I changed tactics and decided to do an art-pass first, and used that as a guide for the proc-gen systems.



One of the first thing I did when upgrading to Unreal 5.0 was converting some of the particle systems over to Niagara. What you see here is a mix of snow particles and a material shader to turn the ground icy!



That's all for this months newsletter! I'm excited to figure out what will come next to show for next month. If all goes well I'm hoping to push another build up to the Beta branch that includes all the latest and greatest for the main quest!

Have a good one!

- DjMonkey

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