TBC Log 7/8/2025

(Abby)
   I, as they say in France, have been “under the weather”. So this will be short. Because I’m really under it. Physically. Mentally I’m as all together as I usually am.
    I’ve also been like, in the process of finding a new home, and then the inhabiting beginnings of moving into and renovating that new home. I’m part of an HOA now. I almost got scammed by a contractor. I didn’t, but almost.
   Most of what I did for TBC was in the first half of this month, as we were not quite crunching but more getting into the weeds of trying to polish the tutorial as much as possible for the Indiecade submission. Sounds a bit like the previous few months, right? Well it has been like the previous few months. I’m so fucking glad and ready to move on from this phase. I am so sick of polish and juice. The time for design has RETURNED.
    A lot of what I did this month was just like. Random crap BS, for the sake of trying to polish stuff. As usual, lots of action selection menu stuff, I was trying to make it so that actions creatures have flickering,  the signals for the players to select, are creature specific, and this logic has been taking a bit of a long time to implement and didn’t make it into the final Indiecade build. I also wanted to clean up the player camera in hopes of fixing the weird crucible button clicking bug. This actually made stuff worse, we found, as this bug appeared where the crucible holding hand would just… disappear? I gave Katie the clicking bug and disappearing bugs and she fixed them, thank the lord. Apparently the clicking was from a collider issue and the disappearing was a culling issue? Her and Roy figured that out together, I’m proud of them starting to get to know one another.
    Honestly really haven’t gotten a ton done this month, between all the house stuff and coordinating onboarding Katie for realsies and like, this submission.
   OH THIS IS WHAT I DID THIS MONTH: I wrote the Indiecade submission essays. For the longest time they were pretty terrible, until my friend Caitlin, who way back a bit ago was helping me with game design for TBC, swooped in and came to the rescue. My knight. Her and I together are sort of spectacular at copy. At least more spectacular than I am alone. She does writing for work and has done lots of writing in school and such so is very competent. At the bottom of the devlog I’ll post the essays for you all to see. Going through this process felt like an electrocuted jump back to the educational system, one of my banes, so I’m really glad this is over, and that we went through it so that it’ll be easier for future festival submissions. Thank you, Caitlin almighty. 

(Roy)
   Roy here, 
   A lot of this month for me was related to puzzles, figuring out how they'll look and be represented in-game but also in menus -- more on that later. I think the previous months of refining the world's atmosphere really helped with this month's when setting up in-game cameras, the world looks a lot prettier! And I hope that doesn't come off as me trying to inflate my ego or anything haha. The process of making stuff is very much like "put it out there then work on refining it later" and to be quite honest, I don't quite know where the inspiration comes from. But I have been trying to sustain it... which hasn't been hard luckily. As for the Puzzle Icons, they took some changing up but I think the decision to make physical, in-game locations/representations of the template icons Abby was using was the right choice.   
   Some of the icons were a bit hard to think of a replacement for to be very honest, I won't say which though hahaha.
   Another thing we (Dark Meadow) has been thinking through was the branding and all that, I remember me and Abby looking for flowers/plants to best represent us and Jimsonweed (Datura) came to mind as a very strong visual statement. The plant itself is really beautiful but it's also something that can mess you up if you don't respect it. The spindly look also matches well with the darker, mystical aesthetics we draw inspiration from. The psychedelic implications also work well with the weirdness, too. lol
   We were also wrapping our heads around the main menu design in the game, I've been thinking about places inside the game that'll provide a really lush, first glance at home in The Back Country.
   On to the models, I've been looking through things to clean up and a fair bit of stuff is still in progress, but I am quite happy with how the hands came out, the original ones are great at evoking a feeling of being a mystical character, but I wanted to make it feel more personal and connected to the scene you're in as a player. So now they have arms, a redesigned hand, and new animations to them!
   One of the biggest head scratching moments I've had in Unreal was over swapping the animals models, you wouldn't believe how many times I have exclaimed questions into the ether with all of the random issues and buggy one-off jank moments there were. I tried a lot of solutions like re-targeting the old meshes with the newer bodies but I wasn't able to make that work inside the programming with how it was designed, and I tried other weird tricks like replacing models out on runtime, that didn't work either... I ended up swapping the original models out themselves... so that was a fun revelation after spending time trying to sub things out originally in a non-destructive way (sarcasm). After that was all figured out the last bit was super annoying haha, for some reason the logic was calling for older textures and materials from those wolves and since I didn't think to replace those two, it was a tumultuous few days until that clicked in and I then promptly swapped stuff out and it worked, none of this is Abby's fault I feel I should mention haha. Just the reality of having an artist come in and mess around with logic based things on top of the art things.
   I do find it really fun but also funny to be an on-call artist, whose tasks range from "can you turn this into a server emoji" to "ok now remaster all of these models". or, "what's your opinion on this" to "ok now think about how this would work well with that", I never get bored of it.

(Katie)
   I just wrapped up my second month working on the Back Country! Like last month, most of my time was spent fixing random bugs for the Indiecade submission. I learned a lot about how post process effects work while fixing some weird build issues with that, spent a lot of time investigating weird colliders on the hand models, fixed culling issues, refined some creature movement, etc. I know it doesn't sound very exciting, but all very necessary stuff to get the build working.
   Along with getting the build prepared I also recorded the build video! Which involved playing through the game for several hours, discovering new bugs, fixing those bugs, then playing and recording more.
   I'm also figuring out some kind of internal build number system/good way to track builds that are uploaded to Steam. This is important to link bugs to certain builds/changes. This is one of those lead engineer-ey tasks that would probably never be my responsibility at a bigger company but is actually pretty fun to figure out. At some point I'll probably need to set up a Mac build machine as well.
   The last part of this month has been some fun design work! We decided to put our design documentation on Obsidian at Roy's recommendation. I've been looking through a lot of Abby's old design documents and consolidating them with new ideas in a hopefully intuitively organized way. The next system we're going to be tackling is events and puzzles! This should add some variance in gameplay and will also be pushing along the narrative of the game. We've decided on some representative puzzles as a team and my current task is figuring out an overarching system in code. It's my first time working on a core system, so I'm going to try to remember everything I've learned about making adaptable systems to make implementing future puzzles as easy as possible. I also want to make sure it's intuitive and works well with the systems Abby has already designed. Exciting things are coming!  

(Carrie)
   Carrie's TestLog
   I think I have the demo music and narration completely memorized now. It's a good demo - my personal favorite part is when the crocodiles show up, since I like how they walk around. A friend asked me what kind of game it was. "Is it a menus game or a platforms game?" I said I don't know, it's very different from MarioKart 8, which is pretty much the only game I play on my own time. He said it sounds like a menus game, and that it sounds really fun. That's accurate. It runs very smoothly at this point! 
   On a more merchandise related note: I found a non-evil company to make cups/mugs/"toothpick holders" etc! Yay! They actually make some of my most favorite mugs and are dishwasher safe. Once we have an idea of interest and demand we may get that going. I've also found that it's almost impossible to order custom logo japanese style bomber jackets online. Everything is like, go to this one store in Tokyo between 3 and 6pm and hope that there isn't a line. I would love to go, since there's a lot of great brutalist architecture out there, but that's not really on my docket for the next several years. Regardless, there will be neat stuff out once the game is out!


Indiecade Essays

Short Game Description
   It's time to embrace your inner forest hag... in this bizarre colony sim, you'll spy on and meddle with clans of wolves, pigs, and crocodiles - managing resources and solving cryptic puzzles that expand the horizons of the world you thought you knew.

Long Game Description
   In The Back Country, players take on the role of a lonely forest hag, observing and influencing the growth of three separate clans of animals. Players assign individual animal’s actions through psionic suggestion, unbeknownst to the animals if done with care. With this ability, the player must guide the animals to develop skills, manage their resources, and help their societies solve mysteries that give both the player and creatures a deeper knowledge of  the world they inhabit. As players observe the animals’ thoughts, they’ll come to know each animal’s unique personality. Animals grow uncomfortable if their sense of self is disrupted too often by being assigned actions they wouldn’t naturally do, resulting in increased or decreased suspicion of the player’s involvement in their community. As time progresses, while the player attempts this management of benevolent subterfuge, animals will live full lives… having and raising children of their own and eventually dying. Through exploring lineage, trust between the player and the creatures, and the osmosis of perspective between different entities, The Back Country is an anthropologically ethereal colony sim that invites the player to explore how mixing the cultural norms of a community can morph its sense of reality.

Artistic Statement
   I was so into “The Warrior Cats” series as a kid. So into it that with my friends on the playground, we roleplayed Warrior Cats… biting one another, running around, giving birth and dying horribly: whatever drama could be extrapolated. As I’ve grown older and accumulated knowledge of my surrounding denizens of the human world, I’ve learned that this is a shared experience among many women my age. There’s something about the drama and cultures of those mentally anthropomorphised cats that was incredibly appealing. So The Back Country is not “The Warrior Cats”, but my take on the creative practices evoked by the series turned into a video game, steeped in our dev team’s combined absurd humor and player-led ludic self expression.
   While the original concept of The Back Country was completely based around observing the animals’ thoughts and interactions with one another, I slowly realized during development that we had to figure out who exactly would be doing such an observation, what kind of person, or being, would subject themselves to such an awkward, yearnful endeavor. And that’s where the hag came from! I think it’s important that she, and accordingly the player, goes through this mental transition of realizing that in order for her companions to embrace her, she must accept and fully grok the reality of the seemingly “less sentient” creatures before her. This mental transition pulls from my own personal explorations of anti-speciesism and love of Frankenstein-ien “between me and my creator” theming. 
   The hag is also kind of a sheepish representation of me, as an adult, trying to conjure up the magic and fun I had as a kid roleplaying the cat clans with my friends, while feeling like an outsider to my own childhood imagination, grasping at memories blurred by time.

Statement of Innovation
   The Back Country marks its territory in the videogame zeitgeist by peeing on the expectation of what a colony sim is. It deliberately subverts the typical focus of detached optimization, and instead emphasizes the beauty of cultural exchange and religious osmosis.
   Mainstream colony sims often put players in the disembodied 3rd person god position, enacting an all consuming, perpetual loop of gathering resources to build bigger, better, more automated colonies of people. The Back Country’s campaign is based around the player being a character, not a god, using its psionic powers to guide the creatures it co-exists with to the ultimate goal of a self-perpetuating animal society. The Back Country has a deliberate end. The intention is fulfillment through shepherding the creatures into self-sufficiency while observing the beauty of their progression over time. 
   To represent cultural exchange to the extreme, we’ve eliminated reproductive boundaries between species and sexes, facilitating fantastical genetic chaos. A single animal might be a carrier in one reproductive episode and a fertilizer in the next. A child will have the model of their carrier parent and belong to their clan, but have the texture of their fertilizer parent. Furry alligators, scaly pigs, and naked pink wolves will abound.
   The Back Country’s interest in mutual spiritual comprehension between groups was not part of the initial schematic of the game, but grew from each development team member’s unique spiritual lens. Abby, our lead, is Jewish and our art director, Roy, is Christian. Throughout the process of development and getting to know one another, we’ve learned about how our perceptions of the world vary due to our religious upbringings, and have brought our differing lived experiences to the fantastical world we’ve built together.