TBC Log 8/11/2024

    So I totally forgot to write this month. I was having some visitors from the east coast over the last few weeks of July and wasn’t working that much, so the “WRITE DEVLOG” day in my calendar came and passed unnoticed. But I’ve noticed now, and I am running to write.

    A lot has happened and not happened during the month of July for TBC. In the beginning of the month, I was playtesting a lot my “intermediate” version of the game. With some core playtests out of the way, I saw that I needed to make some cuts in some places and add emphasis in others. I had to really think about what I want TBC to evoke, and what parts of the game needed to be brought out in place of others so that evocation could happen.
    Something I changed, as an example, is the player’s interaction with and utilization of "whispers". I love the whispers so much. If you don’t know what the whispers are, they are little dialogue bubbles that appear attached to each creature when you zoom in; my intention with them is that they are the creatures’ thoughts, and you as the player have the power of viewing them. I wanted to evoke some kind of “spider sensing changes in the web” kind of thing, something I hope to evoke in future games as well. I’ve often found in social politics this kind of feeling in myself, and i think it is something cool that I want others to understand. Whether the feeling comes from the ability to focus on many things at once (the ADHD), or from a romanticized lens I slather over my life, I think its something others don’t experience in the same way (As is this is one human’s experience. Like I'm not all powerful. Prime example: I can’t even really count).
    BUT back to the game. So I’d been trying to make changes to the whispers to emphasize them, but in playtests i found that players got super overloaded with information when all the creatures showed what they were thinking all the time. I learned that most people’s attention spans, unlike my own, aren’t fed by overload and actually dislike it. so I've changed it to be that you can see the whisper of a selected creature, and accordingly how they feel about their job, while non selected creatures only show their relationship to the selected creature and their current activity. I may change it back as the game progresses, because I think there’s the possibility for the amount of whispers to be less overwhelming if creatures get added to The Valley one at a time (which is what I am planning for the campaign mode). But for now, for playtesting, this is the way the whispers are.

    Another system I decided to overhaul was the creatures' relationship with actions. Before, creatures could only perform actions that corresponded to their predisposed role, but now every creature can do every action, and have skill levels associated with them. A big similarity with this system is that of Rimworld's. There are “action spots” associated with each action on the map that creatures flock to, performing their actions dependent on the player’s pre-set priority of their actions and the creature’s own enjoyment of it. The player can also now drag creatures onto the “action spot” and force the creature to do that action once, taking priority over the player-programmed priority chart. I’m actually really proud of how this is turning out! The dragging-onto-spot mechanic is included though not just for making creatures like, forage once and then do their own thing. It's also for solving puzzles!
    Yes, to all you playtesters who’ve been like, “what am I trying to do?” while playtesting… I finally have an answer for you! You’ve gotta solve all the puzzles while keeping the creatures alive and well. This is based on the “Virtual Villagers” games, which I played a lot as a child. VV has puzzles dependent on “folk knowledge.” For example, a puzzle in VV is “get the honey”, and you have to piece out that lighting a torch and having the villager bring the torch to the beehive, you will be able to access honey as a food source. As a child I struggled to solve these, given my child brain's distinct lack of folk knowledge. But as an adult I’ve been able to figure them out, and they sort of make sense. I'm hoping to playtest the puzzles I design enough that they’ll make sense to most players. They’ll all be based on the same structure: the player drags a creature onto the puzzle trigger point and the creature will be able to complete part of the puzzle or not depending on their associated skill levels (among other things, like level of scientific/spiritual research developed in one’s save).

    So, yeah. beginning of last month was figuring out the mechanics after playtesting, end of last month i was hosting and getting very little done, and now, at the time of writing this dev log, most of the mechanics are in and in a few weeks I'll be playtesting again! And so the cycle continues.