January Development Update
Welcome back to the first development update for Nestables in 2021! The Christmas and New Year’s period was a little slow but there has been significant progress made already this year.
Development Progress
Island Visitation
As mentioned last month, work has begun on the island visitation system. So far, choosing the hybrid options appears to have been a good idea! Already this month we have implemented the ability to load any other saved Nest and fetch all the required data from it. Loading into another player’s Nest will allow you to see their progress and Nestables moving around. To prevent any griefing issues, you won’t be able to directly interact with the Nest. There will however, be a variety of interactions which we will talk about in future posts.
Notifications and UI
Work has continued this month on upgrading the basic UI ingame and adding UI for many of the new gameplay aspects. Last month, we showed you the basic UI layout for the new notification system ingame. This month, we made it look pretty!
There are a few more refinements for this UI before it is completed. Once it is implemented ingame, we will then be able to test the island visitation system and finalise the code for it.
Daily Quests
The notification system will work in hand with the daily quest system. Daily quests will be basic but rewarding tasks, which will encourage players to return to the game on a regular basis and have them exploring different aspects of gameplay. Most of the work for the daily quest system was completed this month, with only further integrations to be done at a later date when other areas of gameplay are completed.
Nestable AI
Patching some of the larger bugs from the pre-alpha required a substantial re-writing of code for some systems. Now that this has been completed, we are able to turn our focus to creating some artificial intelligence for the Nestables.
The way Nestables interact with the map has been completely re-worked. Previously, the only way a Nestable could change tasks was with direct user input. Now, work is being done so that the Nestables can allocate their own tasks with AI. This work will also fix a long-standing bug from the pre-alpha where Nestables would not carry on with their activity after the player closes the game or goes to the building editor.
The Nestables’ AI, will be developed in a way that allows for future iterations and expansions, all with the aim of adding increasing depth and player connections with their Nestables. The first goal of the AI will be to allow Nestables to behave in a way where if not assigned a task, they will focus on regenerating it’s currently worst happiness component. For example, a Nestable with a fatigue below a certain threshold will find a a bed and rest until a different threshold is reached at which point the Nestable will continue it’s previously assigned action.
