Man's Best Friend

Hey all, bob_esc and I have been back to work on this. Mainly we're polishing up a few spots and ironing out the rough patches in the original game. There were a few pinch points where most people couldn't progress past and we're working to overall make the game smoother. This involves things like puzzle choices, clearer dialog, many bug fixes, etc. Although the newer release won't have much new content, it'll certainly be a better game.

There's plenty of new content though! We've added a lot more secrets to the game in the form of 16 collectable haircuts for Miles. They're purely cosmetic, but you can more solidly evaluate your completion percentage now. Finding all the haircuts is fairly difficult and involves running errands for cats hitsquads, uncovering fairy circles, and playing hide-and-seek with the world's greatest. The main storyline of the game is the same, but the world should be a lot more immersive.

Release will be coming as soon as the game gets some solid playtesting.

Okay, so I think I'm going to pull the trigger and put this project on hold, for at least a month. Several reasons:

- It's past its deadline already, but I think we all knew that was going to happen. If this game were running on a tight schedule, it'd be a different story, but I don't want to rush anything.
- It's NaNoWriMo during November. Both bob_esc and I are participating, and we were both busy in the first place. Neither of us anticipate having much time to put towards MBF.
- I'm putting a lot more effort towards a VN project. There's no gamepage up yet, but it's on a much larger scale than this, and I now have real life deadlines to get up a demo. So that takes priority.

As for the current status, the game's about 50% complete, and bob_esc and I have been sporadically making maps on and off. Neither of us have put in a solid day since August. Still, we're making progress. If everything goes as plan, the game will be resumed in late December.

This brings me to my next point... We probably have enough material for a demo, if anyone's interested. The town areas are complete and provide a fair amount of play time, but to be honest, I'm only going to package up the game if there's explicit interest. Otherwise, this project's short enough where I don't see the need for an intermediate release.

Okay, first two weeks of development on Man's Best Friend are over. So, what's happened since then?

Well, the first level, the town underground, is almost complete. We've got a bunch of mine cart routing puzzles set up and a cow mine cart railroad. It may sound a bit out there, but it fits the level. Half of this "dungeon" is peoples' basements anyway.

We'll have a screenshot of the train in action when everything's wrapped up in the first level.

Most of the time right now is going into populating the town with NPCs. It takes a good amount of time to make a single NPC as they have huge branching conversation paths, but it should be worth it.

Mmmm... NPC.

Moving on... why does the RTP not have facesets for half of its People charsets? It's very limiting to have to stick to 6 sprites to populate a good-sized town. Expect a lot of Man 1 wandering around, though luckily enough, the NPCs have personalities to tell them apart.

The scope for the game was also planned out... We're looking at one big town level, three smaller outlying levels (mountain, forest, beach), and one final level (SECRET!). Not an epic game, by any means. Here's our protagonist finding some treasure:


There's now a time system in place as well. Morning/Noon/Evening/Night are all there, and time progresses as expected. Plus there's a neat clock system rigged up, and certain NPCs only appear at certain times.

Also, name of the town was changed from Smallville to Waldsberg after bob_esc realized it was the name of a lame TV show. That's all for now. Release coming in less than a month, probably sooner.