Summary
Oh wow guys. Development for May has been absolutely amazing! My in-laws are super generous and they gave us a loan (loan meaning I will have to pay it back once the game released of course) for development of the game. It's been no surprise that the Kickstarter money has been long spent back in Jan of 2017 and the development has been chugging along on my personal funds. While I was able to keep the game going with my personal funds, it severely limited how much work we could do each money based on how much I could afford. However, now with an extra boost in funds it's like someone put the gas pedal on development and I've been getting so much work done. The purpose is to help us meet out release date faster.
A summer release is not possible as we are still not ready, and I have said repeatedly we're not going to rush the game out the door because of deadlines. The beta has to be pretty solid and approved by our small group of testers before we release it to the public. We're still shooting for this year, but now the deadline is going to be Fall (because Pumpkins of course) or sometime at the end of the year. So far development has been pretty smooth so fingers crossed as I always say, I hope there are no unexpected hiccups.
Systems
 We ran some tests on local to local multiplayer and that looks stable. We will still have dedicated servers no need to panic. Local to local is not ideal, but it's much easier to set up and we're using it to iron out the systems and find bugs in multiplayer mode. Currently it's possible to join a friend's Pumpkin Online game via steam, which is neat. Here are some other systems Jayden has worked on last month.
- Item spawning (Now items spawn in the game world and can be picked up)
- Breakable Objects (For mining, and breaking logs and rocks)
- Choppable trees (Chop down any tree outside of the town for wood)
- Expand your inventory by adding extra bags
And of course the usual bug fixes and UI polish. I'm pretty sure 30% of development is tackling bugs and glitches found by the testers the previous month.Â
Assets and Environment
These are the things that were worked on in relation to assets and level building
- Added new clothes (including glasses) - Added beards to character customization - Added new hairstyles (we are now up to 70+ hairstyles) - Added new food and drink models - Added new flowers (decorated the world with it and they can be gathered.) - Added new decor items that can be bought at the shop - Updated the kitchens and updated their functionality - Assigned texture patterns to different stones (So when you use them in crafting the item receives their pattern) - Filled the game world with trees that are all choppable (just needs to be tidied up) - Fixed up some current UI and designed some new UI that will implemented later. - Fixed up clipping on some of the clothes in character customization (that's going to be a work in progress)
- Added a custom cursor to the gameÂ
Kickstarter Rewards
So I was bad, and I still need to send out the international rewards. I have a stack of some returned letters I had mailed out last month. Honestly, after sending possible 400 letters and getting back around 30-40 is pretty good considering. I'm going to get on top of that this month and start mailing out rewards for the international backers. Then go back to people who said they have not gotten their rewards and resend them out. Again the rewards have been a complete mess but I'm trying to get them sorted out.
Goals for May
- Work on NPC related functions and systems - Add in more item assets, and update some of the UI - Assemble more NPCs
Thanks so much for your support guys!
Thanks again for your support guys