away in the woods: next steps for August-September

10 August, 2024
Tagged as: #game-dev, #away-in-the-woods

A quick reminder/summary of my May through July goals for away in the woods:

I'm pleased to say that I met all of those goals in time! My next stage of development runs through August and September:

Although each section of the game is 25 years apart, I like to call them Day 1/2/3 in my notes for simplicity's sake. Essentially, the goal for these next two months is to finish the first third of the gameplay, and finish all the little graphic components I need cleaned up to do so.

At first I was thinking that I could map out each day with the placeholder graphics, which right now are just labels for what plants they should be, but I quickly learned that my workflow doesn't work quite like that. In order to complete a map I have to be able to figure out what it actually looks like, so the graphics have to be pretty close to finished, even if I still make a few tweaks here and there.

The field guide system is an extra script I didn't originally plan for – but as I was working on graphics for various plants in the game, I realized I needed to give the player a way to easily reference what plant was what. A field guide seemed like a natural way that wouldn't complicate dev or gameplay much while fitting in context. Shoutout to Tei, who recommended I try adapting ForeverZer0's journal script for it.

These months being the beginning of actual fleshed out mapping and gameplay mean I'm finally getting to the point of dev where I have screenshots to show! In the meanwhile, though, have some of the plants I've made so far (yarrow, lavender, chamomile, and rosemary):

Pixels of four different plants in a row: yarrow, lavender, chamomile, and rosemary.