I’d posted a bit about the development on the bird-based website a short time after release, but since said website is in the midst of being sabotaged, it’s time to move that stuff over here instead.

originally there was going to be a quest todo list, and digging to particular destinations would make the connection line glow for a second. this would have been tied to having neighbors walk around in the forest, too, in a simcity kinda way

also there was going to be both a thermometer and a numeric temperature in the UI i guess? since the thermometer reflects player energy/health rather than actual outside temp, it’s pretty obvious why including the number would only have been confusing

originally fraw’s was the only yard that would have been enclosed, to reflect her personality. but with the other two, it became clear how much more satisfying it was to finally enter a more closed, intentional space

(also, for a brief moment, the interior rooms were randomly generated just like the outside is. that would have been a mess though)

these pics were all from when I was implementing and fine-tuning the ski hill, which took surprisingly little time. they’re just random walks with bias on the sides, that flattens out towards the bottom

i didn’t even have to change their length to match the song; got it in one two!

at some point the underground had a connecting path between middle and right side?…. i don’t see how that would have worked for the puzzle, which is probably why it was removed

also, not in this pic, but i kept putting a certain snow patch in the wrong place accidentally 

finally lets talk about the big stuff, the meat and potatoes: generating and saving the overworld forest

it was really obnoxious. unity lets you mutate tilemaps but doesn’t really have a convenient format for saving them arbitrarily

so i have a scene that contains every map in the game, and loads them (and associated sprites) into a bunch of dictionaries

for a long time, as per the pic, the regions of the forest were laid out on a big chessboard. editing them was quite tedious

thankfully i finally got around to splitting the regions up into their own prefabs and combining the fragments together when loaded

my saving process wasn’t smart - i just put each big dict into json, which required not only a different json library, but i also had to write custom converters for each type of dictionary since unity’s vector types are dumb

i’m still nervous that the saving system will break

there’s a lot written online about cleverly using multiple octaves of perlin noise to make fine-tuned terrain details, but i quickly discovered that the chunky round shapes of basic perlin noise worked perfectly for making snowy fields

finally, thanks to the person in the inky discord for pointing out that ink story state doesn’t reset on DONE (i guess thanks to the inky dev too). i enjoyed using ink for writing once i got a handle on it, and will probably use it again for narrative stuff in the future

oh! also! the main outside music went through like 9 different versions, all because the climax motif was something i did on a whim in some weird app on my ipad but it kept sounding too shrill and hurting my ears on repeat, so i had to rerecord it without the nice note sliding

i’m still mad about that