February Development Update
February is a short month and the time has flown! The dev team has made some amazing progress this month with some significant features starting to come together.
Development Progress
Nest / Island Visitation
The initial implementation of visiting other user’s Nests, friends system and social features are complete! This will be a really exciting aspect of gameplay in the future and one that we hope will broaden the game’s attraction to a variety of new users. To showcase it, we thought a video would be easiest!
You will also notice in the video above that all of the UI for notifications and friend system has now been implemented ingame.
Back in December, we talked about the different implementation possibilities of the Nest Visitation system. Going for option three is continuing to allow us a decent amount of flexibility. Visiting other Nests will be critical for courting between Nestables which we will discuss maybe next month…
Furnaces and Biomes
One of the goals for Nestables, as outlined in the “Where next for Nestables” post, was to have different resources in each biome.
Over the past few months, we have been allocating different biomes a resource (or two) as well as getting models and animations made for them.
These resources will be used in a variety of areas, such as crafting different recipes or selling. Furnaces will be used to turn sand into glass, clay into bricks and will be used for a variety of other features into the future.
The intention will be to have a variety of tools that can be multi-purpose. In due course, these will be integrated into our research system.
Those with keen eyes would have also noticed that last month we previewed the new swamp biome in the feature image of our January Development Update. The swamp biome is where Nestables can collect clay. Can you guess where sand will be collected to make glass?
Nestable AI Implementation
Very excitingly, we have our first version of a Nestable AI system functioning. The intention of giving Nestables some limited AI is not only to make them more life-like but also allow them to perform some basis tasks. Don’t worry, this will still mean that you have to check on your Nest on a regular basis. There will be many limits to what the AI can do and how long it will work for.
Currently, we have implemented our “Minimum AI” system. Nestables have no specific personality and will all behave the same. They will however, react based on their needs as determined by their happiness rating. For example:
- A fatigued Nestable will try to find a bed to sleep in, if none is available the Nestable will fall asleep on the spot
- A bored Nestable will find something to play with or maybe create some mischief…
- A Nestable with low levels of cleanliness will find a bath to clean itself
As you can imagine, an AI system will have some fairly significant impacts on gameplay and we will have some cool systems to show you in the future so that any AI induced interactions don’t have any lasting or irreversible impact.
Unfortunately, the AI system is not that easy to showcase. For those that played the pre-alpha, you will know that it can take a while for the happiness rating of a Nestable to change. This meant that recording it in action with a video wasn’t going to work that well. Instead, we have created a log of the activity of a Nestable to show you instead:
