Notices by Cheeseness (cheeseness@mastodon.social), page 6

Doing some initial work on getting more variation/identity into dig biomes

This represents a significant milestone! Every gameplay phase is now represented in the game to some extent. Until now, there was still a gameplay loop missing, and while I need to fill in a lot more content, do a visual pass, make it TTS-friendly, etc., I feel like I can now better demonstrate the "shape" of the game as a whole and it feels a little exciting to come back from a dig site to find some research has finished.

It's still just a first pass, but I've finally got the research phase implemented. You can now spend your surplus fossils on extra bits and pieces to customise your museum with (only additional rooms for now, but that'll expand to include skeleton mounts, display cases, informational displays, lighting, etc.). Once started, research progresses as you visit dig sites and work on assembling skeletons.

I want to give players the choice of a number of different "flag" types as part of character customisation. I don't know how widely they're used, but I've seen these little plastic markers in photos and thought they were cute #screenshotsaturday #gamedev #indiedev

I've also added some camera controls, with the intention of having some dig sites that are bigger than a single screen when fully zoomed out.

Here's the even-more-late-than-last-month "mid-month" status update post for March \o/ https://www.patreon.com/posts/80800973

Knocked together something quick to help illustrate Fossil Sweeper's Dig->Assembly->Museum gameplay loop

Boulderiffic

A little snow

Bit of sand

Mmm, shrubs

Another one

Quick and dirty, quick and dirty

Still a long way from done, but this already feels like somewhere (also there's only two models here - it's amazing what a little rotation and scale will give you for "free")

Muttaburrasaurus' big schnoz (this is from a placeholder skeleton in the style of the prototype's skeleton to replace the chunky "testodon" in the short term - final skeleton designs will likely be a bit different ^_^ )

I'm not doing a proper museum implementation for the upcoming early test builds, but I did want to give somewhere to see assembled skeletons, so I copied the temp character controller from my mock up and generated an environment scaled to fit the player's inventory of skeletons.

Blind-friendly TTS gameplay for the assembly phase's action mode is in (using the same implementation as the prototype for now). You don't have to see/see well to build a dinosaur skeleton.

Also added some tweens when dig sites appear/disappear to help communicate what's going on when you return from a dig site or assembling a skeleton (time intervals are being forced here with a debug shortcut)

Spent last night implementing applying settings during play. Not particularly interesting work or outcomes, but it's nice to be doing this in more robust/flexible ways than I was in the original prototype

Hard might be tuned just a touch too hard right now