Hey everyone! Been a little while! APICO kept me very busy over May with the new update and bug fixes that came with it but I think I'm nearly finished with it all now (sorry beekeepers!) I kept doing Mudborne stuff on and off throughout though, and then June has been a lot of build on top of the prototype I had to start to form the demo - lots of stuff to cover! [hr][/hr]

Froggy Friends

Mudborne's actual story has already been written out at a high level, with the main threads and discussions planned out - as part of that I have 5 different characters to introduce.
APICO definitely suffered from "talking shop" NPCs, so to try and avoid that this time I've tried to spend more time thinking about each NPC's role in the story and different ways you can interact and help them rather than just a simple shop. Unfrotunately, the first NPC above, Hopert the Carpenter, is also the 'crafting station' of sorts for the game, you bring items to trade (like bugs they like) or raw materials and they make what you need. Some of the other NPCs have some very different interactions, but they're met a lot later in the story.
However unlike APICO there is actually things you can help the NPCs out directly with, Hopert has a couple things they need a hand with if you're up for some extra work!
There's also a bit more involvement with the actual story in their dialogue rather than just commenting on progress like APICO did - just overall trying to make them more interesting characters you want to talk to. [hr][/hr]

Guiding Light

I still wanted some guide books in Mudborne, as I think it works well in this sort of game with lots of different mechanics to master - experiment as much as you like but if you're stuck here's some guides. However I wanted to make them more visual and less wordy - APICO definitely suffered from WoT overload. For the 'quests' I grouped them all into key areas - controls, tools, frogs etc, and then had individual one-pager 'chapters' make up the quests.
By using icons on the LHS instead of the chapter titles it makes it a bit less overwhelming to look at, and easier to flick between chapters you want to do. The little lilypad / pond quest overview helps to make it clearer the order you're doing things and how to progress. I was actually dreading implementing the books just because of how much they were a pain in APICO before I remembered I'm in a different engine now and it was actually such a breeze.
For the frogs/mushrooms/critters I thought it'd be overkill to have seperate books for each, so instead settled on one single encyclopedia with all of them together.
I went through a few design options but ultimately ended with something like the above. Icons again for each chapter make for a much nicer collection view as you progress and save you an awful lot of scrolling. My only issue now was how to approach the drawings for the books. I wanted to have a little scene for each entry, for helping build a picture of the world and as a little reward for finding each species as you progress, however I haven't really had to do larger pixel art scenes ever so it's been a bit difficult to accept that what I'm doing now isn't as good as what's in my head.
Some I'm happy with - others not so much. But with how much time I have to work on the full game all I can do is just keep at it and keep drawing and eventually get to where I want to be. Regardless of how much I hate my work, the more detailed scenes also let me show some of the game in way more detail than you see in the cute pixel rendition of the overworld - and are another place I can sneak some little hints/clues into for people to find. The other "books" come in the form of a map, and a notebook - which acts as not only a store for random scraps of notes + journals you come across but also allows you to add your own notes to keep track of things.
Haven't quite settled on exactly how these will be laid out yet as I'm waiting to design some of the notes you discover - I'm thinking vaguely RE style, text on top of a faint rendition of what you're reading, page entry, journal etc. But however it ends up it'll be a nice way of giving you more hints of the world and what happened, as well as some clues to unlocking certain frogs or mushrooms or items. [hr][/hr]

Grow Your Own

As I was playing around with the prototype more, the more I realised the existing mushroom mechanics wouldn't be enough for the demo. I was planning on doing the mushroom farms and the spore gathering (hybrids) stuff for the full game, but as it stood there was too much waiting around + rolling the dice with natural spawns. So I needed to add something, and spore gathering was a mid-late game thing so it had to be mushroom farms - which I hadn't even thought about at this point, and needed to design.
I ended up developing a two-step process - firstly you create compost from different flora items you find, different combinations for different compost that will have their own effects. Then you use that compost in 'cultivators' that allow you to have more of a controlled environment. Mushrooms require a specific temperature + moisture AND environment to form and then bloom. Temperature is mostly based on the day, but other factors can change that. Moisture is based on where the mushrooms are, as well as weather and other factors.
While the compost is a bit experimental at first, you'll find hints and clues to other useful combinations - for example a 'wetter' compost that increases moisture levels by 1, or one that increases the amount of mushrooms you harvest. Later on you'll also be able to use frogs to boost temperature + moisture to extremes - it's no accident that two of the frog genetic traits are UMBRAGE and SATURATION. By adding this process the player can then setup a bunch of cultivators in places to get the right conditions to farm a bunch of mushrooms they need, rather than wait for mother nature to take her sweet time. I also think it's a nice base mechanic that gives me flexibility later to make more complex, like with spore harvesting to create different hybrids to remove genetic modifications you don't want - as well as give you something to be checking on while you wait for your frogs to finish... kissing. [hr][/hr]

Spice Of Life

One thing I also had on the list was 'variants' - slight variations of frog species that have different patterns + colors. However I didn't want to just have these as shiny variants that you get from rolling the dice, as 1. you'd already have this for bugs and 2. it's just not that interesting.
However in a game about genetics it's pretty easy to squeeze in variations of different species. If every species has a set genetic "key" that forms it, (i.e. 4744444) I know all the 'gaps' between species. So if you take the common green species (4444444) and boost the AMPLITUDE to the max you get a new species (7444444) - but if you don't boost it to the max (6444444) you technically still have a common green (as no other species match the key), but I can use that as criteria for a 'variant' of that species.
This was I can increase the rewards for experimenting even more than the base gameplay, and also reward 'mistakes' as you might not get a whole new species but you might still get something new for your efforts. [hr][/hr]

What Next?

There was lots of other bits I did too - a backpack you can equip that will hoover up bugs instead of them going into your inventory, or a settings menu (now with an actual borderless window option what a treat), or a proper file system + home screen.
I also wrote up all of the dialogue + lore entries, did all the descriptions+hints for all the frogs/mushrooms/critters, wrote all the quests (already at about 8000 words oops) - which all helped me find different bits of the demo to tweak and improve. However there's still a LOT left to do - I need to design the actual demo 'map' and all the areas, I need to implement the notebook and the map, control remapping, gamepad support, finish drawing all the book art, draw some cutscenes, add sfx, write music... it's definitely feeling a bit overwhelming at the moment.
It's also super hard to judge the demo right now because I need the world designed with all the different areas to explore and work on unlocking because it's the key motivation - you find new species of frogs to use their genetic 'keys' to unlock portals between the waking/dreaming worlds and get to different areas and treasures. Without that it's hard to tell how much fun the demo is when I'm stuck in the same little prototype area, so I'm also feeling a bit demotivated around whether it will be 'fun' - you know, what a game is supposed to be lmao
I think all the mechanics work well together but still just hard to see the full picture, so for july my first task is to design the actual demo world with all the areas and portals and secrets - then I should be able to actually play the whole thing properly and see where we're at and tell my imposter syndrome to piss off lmao ~ Ell