Hello Saeges!

Work on our first demo has been going quite well, and its release is coming closer and closer. While it is focused on Character Creation, there is a lot more to it than just customizing your avatar's looks. In this small devlog we will talk about some of the other things we are preparing for the demo, the systems we are building and how they will affect the full game, as well as some other interesting tidbits of what we've been doing in the past month.

The upcoming demo

In Farmwand, you take the role of a young Saege, freshly graduated from Magic School and about to venture into the world. The very first step before your adventure, however, is to define who you are. This is what our upcoming demo will be all about, and it is split into two parts: defining your identity and background, and defining your looks. The "looks" part is now essentially finished. We've been working on a fully featured Character Creator, ensuring that it is compatible and easy to use with a gamepad, and adding tons of content for it. [previewyoutube=Zd7JKPqEqPQ;full][/previewyoutube] By the time the demo is available, you will have at your disposal over 40 hairstyles, more than 30 pieces of clothing, dozens of accessories, facial hairstyles, tattoo options, skin marks...over a hundred customization parts for endless combinations! But that is only part of it. Your character is much, much more than their looks. Who you are is super important too!
So, the upcoming demo will also take you through a small interview to define who your character is. And this will actually have some impact in the way you interact with people! But for it to work, we needed a dialog system. The pre-made ones we could find were simply not cutting it for what we had in mind, nor were easy to integrate with what has become an efficient, but very specific pipeline. It was evident we had to make our own. But what do we have in mind, exactly? What do we need in our dialog system?

The Dialog System

A big and common complaint with life-sims in general is that the dialogs are simple, repetitive and, in the worst cases, lifeless. We do not want that to be the case with Farmwand, and despite our very limited resources we want to do our very best with this part of the game as well. So, our dialog system is being built in a way that each character can have many databases of dialogs, some related to the plot, some to their own stories, some general greetings
Some for the player, some for other NPCs so that they can talk to each other spontaneously...and every dialog and conversation needs a bunch of conditions so that our NPCs can comment more or less accurately to what happens in the world. The goal is that you may come across some random NPC and greet them, and they'll say something like "Hi! What a nice morning, right?" if it is indeed a morning. But some other time, they can say "Sorry, no time to talk! It is mighty cold tonight! Better hurry home" if the situation demands so. Of course we cannot have unlimited dialogs. Well...maybe we could if we went the trendy AI / ChatGPT route, but we want Farmwand to be 100% human made, with love
So hopefully this will be a good step in the right direction towards a more believable and enjoyable life-sim. But boy oh boy, is it a lot of work. This first demo will feature the skeleton of the system, and we will build upon it all the way into the full release, whenever that happens. And in the meantime we've been working on several other things! Like a fully functional on-screen keyboard for gamepad users:
Our goblin bandits, which received a revamp and are now in the engine, being animated and implemented into the game:
And a few general improvements to the way farming works, so that you can more easily tell which crops have been planted where, before they sprout:
Thank you for reading this devlog, and for all the support you've given us so far. The release of the demo is near, and we are super excited to let you try this very first bit of Farmwand. We truly hope you'll love playing it as much as we've loved making it. Till next time!