Alpha 0.0.7 - Quests ❓

This is a pretty big update. There was quite a bit of behind the scenes work that went into developing the quest and items systems. A lot of foundational work that will allow me to keep building out the story!

Quests

In this update, the mouse character will task you with your first quest! They are hungry and in need of some food. There is a new quest tracking UI in the upper left of the screen.

I’ve designed the quests to have one or more QuestConditions that need to be satisfied for the quest to be completed. The first one I implemented is an ItemPossessionQuestCondition which is satisfied when a specified item is in the players inventory.

There will end up being many quests in the game that lead you through the story and the different areas.

Items

There are now items in the world. They live in different containers and you can add or remove items from those containers. Currently you can carry 2 items with the idea being that the raccoon doesn’t have a backpack, but they could carry an item in each hand.

Dialog Interaction

I repurposed the original dialog box to work for dialog interaction. Now NPC’s can ask the player questions and you can respond with their preset responses.

Language

I’ve added the ability to set “priority” words to learn for each dialog. The words you learn from each NPC is random to make the play through unique. The issue is that if an NPC uses uncommon or important words, there is a chance you will not learn them when they could be really valuable. So now I can set those words as “priority” words. This means that if you don’t know those words already you will learn them first from the NPC before other words. This allows me more control over the flow of language learning and I can seed words to the player as it makes sense in the story.

NPC’s also have the capability to teach you an entire language too. If you become very good friends with a creature they may teach you their language rather than just a word or two. This may end up being a long quest-line that will take a while to complete.

Companions

Once you complete the quest for the mouse, not only will they teach you the mouse language in return, but they can become your companion and follow you around!

This is very much the first iteration of the companion system. I really like the idea of there being many different companions available in the game and the player being able to choose which one they want as their companion. Companions will follow you around and help you out in different contexts.

Experimental sprint

I actually added this mainly for debugging, so it was quicker for me to move around while testing things. But we will see how it goes, maybe it will be removed or maybe with will get more polish.

Saving and Game State

The saving functionality was rewritten to use Godot resource files. This allows very easy serialization of custom data types.

I also began centralizing the game state into a GameStateManager, so things like the InventoryManager and QuestManager simply use the state manager to manage their state instead of handling it internally and individually. This offloads the complexity of state management onto the managers when they are doing their functions. Then saving and loading game data becomes very simple, just serialize or deserialize the data into the GameStateManager and everyone else references that.

Input

I am now tracking the last used input method, whether it be the keyboard or a joypad. This is so that I can differentiate logic based on the input method.

So far I have used this to modify the player movement vector when using a joypad so that it isn’t mapping to the isometric angle like I do with keyboard input. Makes the input feel a bit more natural for a joystick.

Also I am using the input method to differentiate some UI controller hint elements. So they can display the correct button graphic whether you are using a keyboard or a joypad.

Features in the future

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

• Known/unknown words interface
• Controls remapping
• Content! As the systems start to get more fleshed out I am slowly shifting to building out the story and world
• and much more…

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

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

🐺🍑🎮