March & April Dev Update

Private testing of a Nestables Beta has been underway the past two months, with members of the community getting an opportunity to see how the game has progressed since the open Alpha.

Pictures from Thomas’ Nest during the Closed Beta Testing

Development Progress

Development progress over the past two months has involved a significant amount of bug fixing, gameplay additions and responding to feedback provided by the private beta testers. Quite a bit of time has been spent on quality of life improvements for different aspects of the game. Overall, it has been an extremely productive couple of months, bringing the game closer to something where everyone can play.

There is still a significant amount of polish to be added, gameplay refinement and balancing before this can happen though!

Resource Balloons

In our December and November development update, we talked about implementing resource balloons into Nestables. These balloons will allow for an interactive and fun way for new recipes, special items etc to be dropped off into the Nest. They will spawn at random intervals and if you want to find out what is inside them, then you must task your Nestables with shooting them down!

The UI for the Resource balloons has been completed and implemented ingame.

Listed below is just a small preview of the more notable bug fixes, improvements an gameplay changes implemented over the past two months:

General Bug Fixes / Improvements

1. Fixed issue with egg spawning logic and camera focus
2. Fixed couple various issues with placement logic
3. Fixed issue with decorations not being able to return to inventory
4. Fixed issue with props placement logic being blocked by empty space
5. Updated tea UI to include proper filter dropdown menu instead of search bar
6. Fixed issue with planting logic (seed getting stuck when changing nestable selection during planting)
7. Updated breeding UI to show traits
8. Farms will now recover if they find themselves in an impossible state, this will require a game restart
9. Exploration progress will be reset and the requirements returned if the exploration progress fails.
10. Improved AI behavior, nestable should not hang in the bathtub unnecessarily long now
11. Fixed bug that caused exploration progress to be lost
12. Fixed bug that prevented decorations to be placed on some productive interactable objects
13. Modified research durations, higher level topics will now take longer to complete
14. Move tool can no longer be used on farms
15. Improved Nestable pathfinding

Gameplay Changes

1. Social decay now depends on the total number of Nestables in the nest.
2. Social regeneration is now boosted by Nestable affection
3. Daily quest requirements and rewards now depend on the sum of all Nestable research levels
4. Implemented a quick view of researched topics in the nestable info menu
5. Cooking now regenerates a small amount of hunger so not to trigger the critical hunger response
6. Implemented UI hotkeys: I for inventory, S for store, C for character screen, Q for quests, B for breeding and E for exploration
7. Added Childhood UI — only accessible by juvenile Nestables
8. Upgraded AI for adolescent Nestable; they will now seek out passive learning opportunities, prioritizing Nestables with which they have the highest affection for.
9. Overhauled all interactable objects and their interaction point logic (as shown below in this beautifully pixelated gif. Medium doesn’t allow .mp4’s sadly)

In total, over 70 bugs / gameplay fixes have been done over the past two months.

We are excited to keep you as a community informed of our development progress. Until the next post, you can stay tuned with our progress via our Telegram & Twitter and don’t forget to clap if you have liked what you have read above!

~ Tribal Gaming