Welcome to town!

Finally - and for real, this time - Peanut Village is properly in Scrabdackle!

Nestled in between the territorial Ducklands, the desolate Rubble Ruins, and the muck of the Junk Heap, Peanut Village is home to the many peanuts scattered around Scrabdackle. Wand to take a tour? Check out the Visitor's Centre, or stop by the town square - the art gallery may be suspiciously closed on your first visit, but the Boot Shop's always open for business! Go ahead, take a look around!

So what's new, in terms of content? I'll be up-front here - this is not a gameplay-content-oriented update, big though it may be. Most of the effort here has gone into setting up a variety of subsystems and features that both this town and future content will draw from, as well as a bunch of art and dialogue that gives the village density but not necessarily gameplay. To that end, I have not added any secret stars in this update. I did, however, add a hidden feature which will give some more life and replay value to the existing content, which should help offset that a bit.

As mentioned before, this update was heavily displaced by me moving IRL, so it took many weeks longer than it otherwise would (I probably delayed this by 6 weeks of dev time in all). Future updates won't come out this slow, and now that my workstation's set back up and we're unpacked, I'm very excited about what comes after this (more on that below!)

Hey, quick sidebar - we crossed 6,000 downloads recently! Holy smokes you guys! Thank you for all the support!

One last callout before I let you go play - we're still targeting a Kickstarter in early 2021, and if you haven't yet, it'd mean so much to me if you sign up for the mailing list on the Scrabdackle website. It sounds dry, but it honestly makes a really big difference for when it's time to get the campaign rolling.

Thanks, have fun!

Patch 05 changelog (content update!):

• Completely developed Peanut Village!
  • In addition to the subsequent major bullets, this also included creating a variety of new buildings and the final layout, plus populating it properly with large and small dialogues.
  • When the lore system is in place, a lot of things in the village (most things that use unique art, as a rule of thumb) should tell you more about the world and the village, as well.
• Created a hint feature that points you towards secrets you haven't uncovered.
  • A feature for story path hints will be implemented in the full game.
  • In the future, provided hints will be stored to your lore book.
• Revamped all existing conversations to use standardized NPC expressions
  • This should give a TON of personality
  • Okay, admittedly not all - the fishernut's expression isn't meant to change, and one mysssteriouss character is still overdue some more art for this. But all the regular nuts should be updated!
• Rebuilt dialogue system
  • (previewed in 04c - not much new to say, but read this older devlog for heavy detail on what a beast this task was!)
• Built a sprite slicer to allow for complex wall shapes in 2.5D (like a cylindrical building)
  • I'm hoping to do a short tutorial on this soon. Y-sorting is easy when walls perfectly follow the Y or X axes, but becomes complex with curved or diagonal walls, like the cylindrical shape of the peanut houses. You effectively have to split the sprite into multiple sprite slices so that the Y-point of comparison can be dynamic across the original sprite horizontally.
• Built Peanut NPC randomizer
  • This lets me easily choose a shell colour and one of 12 body types, or randomly assign them to get a healthy diversity of nuts.
  • This system will generally be reusable for future NPC types even though it's currently only drawn for peanuts. It only needs new art assets to fit a new NPC type.
• Built generic NPC controller
  • What this means is that I can easily set NPCs to roam, stay still, follow a path, or a blend of these actions to make a scene feel more 'alive'. It sounds small, but it adds a huge amount of 'world-feel', and it's super re-usable for the future.
• Rebuilt event system + added saving/loading system
  • Only one savefile is supported right now for simplicity, but there will be more for the full game.
    • Saves can theoretically be backwards-compatible, although it's likely I'll refresh it for most major demo versions while I'm still building systems out.
  • Events can now be queried, so for example, it can be determined if a specific star has been found, and if not, if the player has the prerequisites to be capable of finding it yet.
    • This will lead to some advanced stuff (on the back-end) in the future - if the system knows you need to get to Location A but don't have Ability B (needed to access it), it'll check to see how far along you are towards getting Ability B and may suggest you continue exploring Location C where B is found instead. As a reminder, the game is built to be non-linear so there's lots of stuff to account for and no single main path.
• ???
  • Added ??? region.
  • ??? added to game, offering ??? for ???
    • This is a first pass on ???, so I'll be interested in seeing initial feedback here.

• A few bugfixes:
  • A number of counters adjusted to be locked to a constant engine framerate regardless of local hardware framerate. This mainly affects things like gravity physics for all creatures, or things like how long dust motes pause before leaping at the player.
  • Tweak to some garbage piles so you can't just walk straight into the Ruins without the wand.
  • The event rebuild means things like the wand event being repeatable or keeping the wand on death without saving after getting it won't happen again.
  • A few changes to further streamline the wand-getting experience. Added dialogue, some junk piles, and a mini NPC.
  • Fixed that problem where the background music gets all screwy if you rapidly change regions. (I think this also fixes the sharp 'snap' that starts to appear at the beginning of a new BGM track after a while, too)
  • Some misc polish and art stuff I'm not sure I wrote down. Just stuff I tweaked as I happened to notice it.

What's coming next?

Next up is the "Ducklands + lore" 06 update, which is going to see a slew of new rooms/enemies/secrets, a fair amount of menu UI polish as I build a 'final' UI, and the lore system I've been super excited to start work on. You'll finally be able to track information about each creature in the world using the "Study" spell (name to be finalized), as well as jot down rumours, monitor secret star progress, and learn more about NPCs and other things of note about the world. (It's possible this update will be too big and I'll have to divide it in two, in which case I'll focus on just the Ducklands and lore system and leave UI and other tasks for an 07 build. In that case, 07 would be the final demo release version pre-Kickstarter.)

The lore system is the last major piece of the puzzle needed for the demo to be truly "systems complete," and it should make looking around even more satisfying. Plus, although a lot of systems fell into place for this update, as I said it isn't especially content-heavy outside of dialogue, so the Ducklands update will really revitalize things. Feel free to check out the live public roadmap on Notion to see how it's going, and I'll be sure to update here every week or two as well.

See you next time! Or, if you want to see what's coming up before it comes out - see you on Discord!