I'm not sure if this is intended, but the demo ends when I find the hidden raccoon whether I got the mouse as a friend or not. The game looks really good and I can't wait to see more! Is there going to be a PC version, too, when final version comes out?
It’s sort of intended? The demo is very minimal right now still. Soon I’ll begin chaining some of the quests together and start fleshing out this level.
The goal is that the final game will be for PC & Mac and unlikely an HTML5 game. I like having the alpha playable on the web to gauge interest and get feedback.
I appreciate you stopping by and checking the game out! Check back later for updates!
really really cute idea, i agree with what some other commenters have said (i dont want to be repeating the same things lol) but im super excited to see where this goes and how it improves, nice job!
I agree with points @GammaFoxTBG's critique, my main issues were the raccoon's speed and the wait time between the sentences.
It would be great if you could fast forward the dialogues. One click shows the phrase completely and the second skips it and forwards to the next, like in many RPGs.
Skipping to the end of dialogs will definitely be a feature.
Currently I am storing the dialog for each NPC in a JSON file, with a list of sentences (not words) and an associated language string. I wanted to keep the dialog in an easy to write and modify format so that its easy to add dialog and easy to eventually localize it.
I then have a language parser system that will split the dialog strings into tokens and check the language manager system to see if the player knows the word in the given language. The language manager has lists of known words for each language. If not the word is replaced with the obfuscation characters and then built back into the full sentence. Then its pushed out to get displayed and animated.
Other than the language learning mechanic, the dialog is quite static right now, there is no branching or anything like that. This will evolve over time though as more content and more complicated quests and dialog get added to the game.
Thanks for the explanation! I'm not very skilled with using multiple languages for one task, but I am genuinely interested in using JSON! So far I've used it only for saving data in Godot games.
Good luck with the project! As I said, I would love to see it grow.
I like the idea of learning languages by exploring.
I did find the Trees blocking the way kind of annoying since the movement speed is kind of slow. I had trouble speaking to the crow in the tree, and the crows in the lake.
Ideas:
Maybe add a progression indicator? Ex: You learned 78% of the crow language.
Make the racoon speak? If the raccoon is looking for it's child, make him ask the crows. (Maybe not every time but per area).
Make objectives unveil themselves as you learn languages: Ex: a crow tells you to tell the bear blocking the way to wake up. This tells you to learn the bear language to progress to the next area. It makes the next objective unveil itself by using your main mechanic!
(These are just ideas. Doesn't mean they fit with your game.)
I plan to add some kind of interface in the future where you can see all the words you know of each language and get a sense of how many more exist in the game that you haven’t learned yet. There will be achievements for becoming fluent in each language.
I am currently building the first iteration of the quest system in the game so that you can track specific objectives, but yea like you suggested the intention is to lean into the language mechanics for a lot of the puzzles and quests. If you can figure out what to do with the words you currently know you will be able to progress the story. But if you can’t figure out what to do you will need to explore more and learn more of the languages to reveal more clues.
Maybe the protagonist will talk? I haven’t fully decided on the final format that the dialog will take.
Really cute game! Very bright and atmospheric, I think the general premise of having to learn language from other creatures and use it to piece puzzles together is a really awesome idea, and I think that this could come to be a really interesting game.
Wanted to give some design feedback for you in its current state, so I apologize for the following wall of text.
The map is big and expansive, so that gives a lot of wiggle room for you to put things in, which is definitely something that will help in the future. The overall traversal workload is pretty high, so you may want to consider reducing that. What I mean is that, the map is big, and the raccoon moves very slowly, so if I think "Wait, maybe I can understand that crow near the beginning of the game now" or "Did I miss a crow somewhere?" it can take a lot of time to get over there. This may get a bit frustrating for players later on when you inevitably scale things up and you have to move around even larger spaces. So either increasing the movement speed, or creating other traversal options down the line would help greatly (shortcuts, open up new paths to loop, etc.) I suspect you probably have plans to approach this down the line, but just thought I'd bring it up.
The text system looks very clean and well-polished, and I think the way you encrypt the unknown language is great. The fact that you can also change text speed is a great QoL addition as well. One critique of it I have is that characters like your guide raccoon could probably use larger speech bubbles to allow you to process bigger strings of text. Perhaps have it wait for the player to interact again to resume the next chunk of dialogue. It's a bit hard to keep track of the conversation when you're fed one half of a sentence, and then reading the next and trying to keep it all together in your head as you read. The text speed is definitely a good start to help that though.
The map layout so far is good! I think the way you've designed it to carefully guide the player and allow some freedom but make sure they focus on the starting area is a good decision. The sidewalks are also a really clever idea to be able to give a bit of guidance of where you can go, but also allow players to reconvene if they decide to explore off the path for a bit.
The sprites are very clean and contrasts well, and the silhouette was a great idea, especially to set you up for some secrets in the future. I'm not much of an artist, so take this with a grain of salt, but I would argue that the ground seems just a tad too noisy, and might benefit from reducing the number of the sprouts/grass-patches a bit, and/or mixing in some smaller details like perhaps a pebble here or there. Just so it doesn't take too much of the attention while you're walking, as the dark green ones draw a bit of attention with their contrast while you're walking around already trying to explore and find things.
Overall, I think you're doing an awesome job so far. It's looking really good and I'll be sure to keep an eye out for more updates. If you'd like to discuss stuff further or anything, feel free to message me on Twitter (same name). Keep up the awesome work.
Thanks for the feedback GammaFoxTBG! I really appreciate it! 💖
I agree movement already can feel a bit slow. I will likely speed up the character movement a bit to make the player feel a bit more nimble. But also I think I will need to create some kind of theme appropriate fast-travel system to move between the main areas of the world.
I also agree about bigger speech bubbles. I’ve just been avoiding trying to code multi-line speech bubbles and just breaking up the text for now, but eventually I will need to tackle that.
The grass and flowers are going to get a complete revamp eventually. I’d like them to be reactive to the player (like move as the player brushes by them) and maybe eventually have a wind system that can make the grass and tree leaves sway. I just started on this today and it’s been fun, my first time using shaders!
I appreciate the compliments and the thoughtful comments!
← Return to game
Comments
Log in with itch.io to leave a comment.
nice game!although its way too laggy.
Will there be a Linux version?
Perhaps! Cannot guarantee at this point but I would like to support as many platforms as possible.
Okay :)
If you do decide to in future, hit us up on GOL https://www.gamingonlinux.com/
I'm not sure if this is intended, but the demo ends when I find the hidden raccoon whether I got the mouse as a friend or not. The game looks really good and I can't wait to see more! Is there going to be a PC version, too, when final version comes out?
It’s sort of intended? The demo is very minimal right now still. Soon I’ll begin chaining some of the quests together and start fleshing out this level.
The goal is that the final game will be for PC & Mac and unlikely an HTML5 game. I like having the alpha playable on the web to gauge interest and get feedback.
I appreciate you stopping by and checking the game out! Check back later for updates!
I like the graphics a lot, and this idea is very neat!
really really cute idea, i agree with what some other commenters have said (i dont want to be repeating the same things lol) but im super excited to see where this goes and how it improves, nice job!
A very neat project.
I agree with points @GammaFoxTBG's critique, my main issues were the raccoon's speed and the wait time between the sentences.
It would be great if you could fast forward the dialogues. One click shows the phrase completely and the second skips it and forwards to the next, like in many RPGs.
I'm curious, how do you handle the dialogue system? Do you have an array of words and build the phrases of some Word resource, or...?
Thanks for your comments!
Skipping to the end of dialogs will definitely be a feature.
Currently I am storing the dialog for each NPC in a JSON file, with a list of sentences (not words) and an associated language string. I wanted to keep the dialog in an easy to write and modify format so that its easy to add dialog and easy to eventually localize it.
I then have a language parser system that will split the dialog strings into tokens and check the language manager system to see if the player knows the word in the given language. The language manager has lists of known words for each language. If not the word is replaced with the obfuscation characters and then built back into the full sentence. Then its pushed out to get displayed and animated.
Other than the language learning mechanic, the dialog is quite static right now, there is no branching or anything like that. This will evolve over time though as more content and more complicated quests and dialog get added to the game.
Thanks for the explanation! I'm not very skilled with using multiple languages for one task, but I am genuinely interested in using JSON! So far I've used it only for saving data in Godot games.
Good luck with the project! As I said, I would love to see it grow.
Noice :)
Neat Concept! Very cute art style.
I like the idea of learning languages by exploring.
I did find the Trees blocking the way kind of annoying since the movement speed is kind of slow. I had trouble speaking to the crow in the tree, and the crows in the lake.
Ideas:
Maybe add a progression indicator? Ex: You learned 78% of the crow language.
Make the racoon speak? If the raccoon is looking for it's child, make him ask the crows. (Maybe not every time but per area).
Make objectives unveil themselves as you learn languages: Ex: a crow tells you to tell the bear blocking the way to wake up. This tells you to learn the bear language to progress to the next area. It makes the next objective unveil itself by using your main mechanic!
(These are just ideas. Doesn't mean they fit with your game.)
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Good job! I'll keep an eye on the project!
Thanks for the comments!
I plan to add some kind of interface in the future where you can see all the words you know of each language and get a sense of how many more exist in the game that you haven’t learned yet. There will be achievements for becoming fluent in each language.
I am currently building the first iteration of the quest system in the game so that you can track specific objectives, but yea like you suggested the intention is to lean into the language mechanics for a lot of the puzzles and quests. If you can figure out what to do with the words you currently know you will be able to progress the story. But if you can’t figure out what to do you will need to explore more and learn more of the languages to reveal more clues.
Maybe the protagonist will talk? I haven’t fully decided on the final format that the dialog will take.
Thanks again for your comment!
Really cute game! Very bright and atmospheric, I think the general premise of having to learn language from other creatures and use it to piece puzzles together is a really awesome idea, and I think that this could come to be a really interesting game.
Wanted to give some design feedback for you in its current state, so I apologize for the following wall of text.
The map is big and expansive, so that gives a lot of wiggle room for you to put things in, which is definitely something that will help in the future. The overall traversal workload is pretty high, so you may want to consider reducing that. What I mean is that, the map is big, and the raccoon moves very slowly, so if I think "Wait, maybe I can understand that crow near the beginning of the game now" or "Did I miss a crow somewhere?" it can take a lot of time to get over there. This may get a bit frustrating for players later on when you inevitably scale things up and you have to move around even larger spaces. So either increasing the movement speed, or creating other traversal options down the line would help greatly (shortcuts, open up new paths to loop, etc.) I suspect you probably have plans to approach this down the line, but just thought I'd bring it up.
The text system looks very clean and well-polished, and I think the way you encrypt the unknown language is great. The fact that you can also change text speed is a great QoL addition as well. One critique of it I have is that characters like your guide raccoon could probably use larger speech bubbles to allow you to process bigger strings of text. Perhaps have it wait for the player to interact again to resume the next chunk of dialogue. It's a bit hard to keep track of the conversation when you're fed one half of a sentence, and then reading the next and trying to keep it all together in your head as you read. The text speed is definitely a good start to help that though.
The map layout so far is good! I think the way you've designed it to carefully guide the player and allow some freedom but make sure they focus on the starting area is a good decision. The sidewalks are also a really clever idea to be able to give a bit of guidance of where you can go, but also allow players to reconvene if they decide to explore off the path for a bit.
The sprites are very clean and contrasts well, and the silhouette was a great idea, especially to set you up for some secrets in the future. I'm not much of an artist, so take this with a grain of salt, but I would argue that the ground seems just a tad too noisy, and might benefit from reducing the number of the sprouts/grass-patches a bit, and/or mixing in some smaller details like perhaps a pebble here or there. Just so it doesn't take too much of the attention while you're walking, as the dark green ones draw a bit of attention with their contrast while you're walking around already trying to explore and find things.
Overall, I think you're doing an awesome job so far. It's looking really good and I'll be sure to keep an eye out for more updates. If you'd like to discuss stuff further or anything, feel free to message me on Twitter (same name). Keep up the awesome work.
Thanks for the feedback GammaFoxTBG! I really appreciate it! 💖
I agree movement already can feel a bit slow. I will likely speed up the character movement a bit to make the player feel a bit more nimble. But also I think I will need to create some kind of theme appropriate fast-travel system to move between the main areas of the world.
I also agree about bigger speech bubbles. I’ve just been avoiding trying to code multi-line speech bubbles and just breaking up the text for now, but eventually I will need to tackle that.
The grass and flowers are going to get a complete revamp eventually. I’d like them to be reactive to the player (like move as the player brushes by them) and maybe eventually have a wind system that can make the grass and tree leaves sway. I just started on this today and it’s been fun, my first time using shaders!
I appreciate the compliments and the thoughtful comments!