October Development Update
The spooky month has flown past and once again, it is time for another monthly development update for Nestables. Many Nestables were getting into the spirit of Halloween. Let’s dive into this month’s development update!
Development Progress
AI Food System
Quite a while ago now, we implemented an artificial intelligence (AI) system for the Nestables. This is something that you would have seen operational during the Alpha. Leaving your Nestable idle for a while will see it run off to perform a task of its choice and maintain a decent happiness rating. The same occurs while you are offline, your Nestables will continue to work and perform different tasks around the Nest. The AI is quite powerful, to the extent that your Nestable could continue to operate for a long time even if you didn’t login. Your Nestable of course, still needed to eat!
This month, we added fridges to the game that allow you to store food in them. Food stored in fridges will be used by the Nestables to keep them and the AI running! Larger fridges store more food and therefore, will allow the Nestable’s AI to continue working while you are offline for a longer period of time. In total, there are four different types of fridges:
Eski > Small Fridge > Medium Fridge > Large Fridge
To get a larger fridge, you will be able to upgrade it using gold collected from gold panning. Fridges will automatically be assigned to a Nestable when it is placed. Returning a fridge to your inventory will clear both its contents and ownership.
Research Station
Despite researching being a key part of the Nestables gameplay, accessing the different research topics has never been that obvious or given the level of importance that it deserved. This is something that we have been mindful of since the pre-Alpha. Over the past month, we have started work on a Research Station. Research Stations will form a central area where Nestables will go to unlock new gameplay features and improve their performance in different areas.
Work will continue on this over the course of November, including allowing juvenile Nestables the ability to observe adult Nestables while researching and gain some sort of passive bonus.
Bug Fixes / Other Development Progress
Like other months, we have continued to squash bugs and balance gameplay over the course of the month. Some of the main ones include:
- Fixed bugs relating to prop placement
- Fixed sync issues with the currency counter
- Updates for the Cooking UI — Implemented Food / Tea Tabs
