0.0.3 Alpha - Speech Bubbles 🗨

Hello everyone! Nice to see you all! Here is the latest alpha build of (tentatively titled) Ringtail! 🦝

What is Ringtail? It is a small adventure and exploration game where you play as a raccoon disconnected from their family. In order to find your way you need to communicate with all the other creatures of this world. But to begin with, you don’t understand their languages! Upon talking to each new creature of a species you will learn a new word for from their language and you can understand more of what they are saying. The better you understand this worlds inhabitants, the more clues you uncover!

Ringtail is a game that I am building in my spare time while working my full-time job as a software developer.

Here are some of the interesting changes in this latest 0.0.3 alpha build.

Speech Bubbles

I rewrote the dialog system to use speech bubbles placed above the characters that are speaking. Previously it used a dialog box that lived in the lower third of the screen. This worked fine but I really liked the idea of the speech bubbles living in the world with the characters. There is still work to do on it but I think it is coming along really nicely!

Title Scene

The headlining feature of this build was suppose to be the new title scene but I think the speech bubbles are coming along really nicely. Regardless, the game has a “placeholder” title scene and options menu. Also a SceneChanger system that swaps scenes out with a fade effect. The transition effect might be placeholder as well but we will see how development progresses.

0.0.3 Alpha Demo Level

I added a few more things to this “world 1” demo level to start making it more of a “demo”. There is a goal and end state now; you are trying to find the baby raccoon. And there are more crows to help give you hints about where to look but that also means there are more words to learn in the crow language! The human NPCs are placeholders and were added mostly to help me get the art to the right scale.

The Future

Here is a small list of features and enhancements to look forward to in the near future:

• Feedback when learning a new word
• Pause ability
• Options menu with text speed settings (eventually other accessibility settings as well such as more legible fonts)
• Save and continue game progress
• and much more…

I post updates a couple times a week on my Twitter and Instagram accounts, both @wolfpeachgames.

Also follow us here in Itch.io for these more detailed updates. Each new update will be accompanied with the latest alpha version with new features and fixes!

🐺🍑🎮