In a few days I’ll be releasing the next Were-Release for my project. This’ll only be my 2nd time doing so, and I think I had just one follower (myself) for the 1st release, so I wanted to take the time to explain about what you can – and can’t – expect out of this.

In short, a Were-Release is a very early demo of Village Monsters that is released on a monthly basis (the day of the full moon – thus the name!)

Each Were-Release serves as a snapshot of what the in-development game looks like at that particular point in time. Because it’s based on an arbitrary date, no extraneous work goes into these demos – you won’t find any misleading vertical slices, scripted demos, or any other type of smoke & mirrors.

Instead, I take the latest stable build I tested and upload it to my site. This allows players who love to watch the evolution of a game’s development experience Village Monsters and provide feedback without a lot of wasted work on my side.

It’s important to note that a Were-Release is not considered a ‘ship-able product’. You’ll never need to pay or sign up for anything to receive it, but it’s going to be rough, buggy, and things will frequently change from build to build.

From a feature, visual, and overall ‘feel’ standpoint, each Were-Release version is indicative of the final game: everything you encounter or experience will in the final game in some form.

However, please do not use these releases to gauge the quality of the final game. I frequently do a lot of experimentation, and certain elements may be bad or plain broken at times. This in no way reflects what you’ll see in the final release.

I hope as many people as possible can play these early demos, as there’s something really special about seeing a game spring to life over time. However, I also completely understand that some people simply want to wait for a more stable, more polished game – if so, please consider waiting for a different type of release later this year!

Above all, these releases are meant for feedback. All bugs, feature requests, complaints, and everything else will be read by me and added to the backlog for analysis. I’ll monitor comments and my email address for feedback. You can also catch me on Twitter at @WarpDogs

Did some “worldbuilding” last night, this time fleshing out the village of…uh, unnamed, I guess.

This part has been without a doubt my favorite.

Names in bold are mostly final, whereas the unnamed villagers get just a short blurb describing their general idea.

There’s a lot of them – probably too many. They aren’t all major, and I could afford to make 2-3 cuts to bring it down if needed, but I’m pretty happy with how this looks currently and will be sticking with it for now.

SNOWED IN

Week of February 5th, 2017

WARP DOGS’ CORP LOGS

• The state of our WARP CORP continues to hold steady at ~really god damned good~
• The Extinction-Level-Event (ELE) is now ~46 weeks away. Remarkable!

An errant Comcast payment aside, this was another good week. All my planning and saving is apparently paying off, which is good! Maybe I wasn’t so crazy after all.

Maybe.

The end of this week marks the ~1 month mark since I started this venture. At first time went by slowly, but now it’s barreling down the highway as things settle in. There’s a long way to go until I reach the end of wherever this thing is taking me, but it sure feels closer now than it ever has.

SPRINT GOALS

Last sprint may have been the first one where I actually laid out what I hoped to achieve and – by god! – I actually did it! Let’s see if I can continue building on that success, however brief.

A new were-release is out this Friday, and for me that’s going to serve as a great motivator for focusing on tangible content. Last week was great, but it was very technical and very refactor-heavy – it’s fun to work on behind-the-scenes stuff, but it’s only fun for me, not for players.

Here are some goals that I think are achievable and provide some good bang vs. buck for the upcoming release…

• Focus on UI elements, especially related to calendars and menus
• Create little ‘proof of concepts’ of seasonal changes
• Add the 1st draft run of Overflow, a central location that will be visited throughout the game

Look forward to a new version to play with by Friday. Who knows – I might deliver you an actual game! Wow!

THE EMERALD CITY

Week of January 29th, 2017

OVERVIEW

This week had some of the highest highs as well as some of the lowest lows.

On Tuesday I had perhaps my most productive day so far on the technical front, and on Friday I finally reached the summit of Mt. Dialog and implemented that system I had put off for so long.

But I also spun my wheels a lot. Some days I’d look up and realized that hours had passed without much to show for it.

This coming sprint ends on a full moon – and with that, a new release. I’m hoping that such a big occasion helps clarify my focus and productivity…if only to avoid being embarrassed by what I eventually put out there for folks to try

HIGHLIGHTS

• Solved a nasty FPS drop that was being caused by Vsync. Weird, right?
• Accomplished a huge goal by designing and finishing a new dialog system
• Experimented with some ideas related to diversions (like claw machines)
• Implemented some feedback to reduce clock size, fixed up dog animations, and more
• Bought a harmonica! More on that later…
• Fixed our vacuum by splicing together a new plug – hey, it counts!!
• Started adding layers of ‘flavor’ in the form of random birds that fly by
• A lot of major and much-needed refactoring & improvements to the inventory, clock, and popup notice systems
• Created a proof a concept for world map viewing, panning, and zooming

LOWLIGHTS

• More than a few wasted days
• Refactoring is pleasing from a problem solving standpoint, but I’m not exactly moving ‘forward’ when I do it. I should try to minimize the amount of rework to systems I’m doing

SHOW & TELL