The art-style is really cute. I also like the fact that it's a rather different game than the common shoot-n-destroy we see so often.
Keep up the good work! :)
I'm brewing an idea of a game very similar to yours for quite a few months.. but never get started because I can't get past that block of "need more ideas for gameplay and to make it fun". I appreciate people who can just get started on it.. I'm too much afraid of investing loads of time and then giving up due to not being able to find the ideas I need to finish it :(
Maybe you could add other interactions with the animals ? Maybe you could befriend them ? And you could also get seeds/materials from the plants, and make food with that for your animals ? Or potions ?
These are just some ideas, and I'm not sure if they are really good for your game, as this would add a more survival-ish side to your game. Let me know what you think ! :D
ive definitely thought about like...food, and using food both to eat and to lure animals...but i have yet to figure out a way to have that work with like, a lot of different animals, since they all have different ways of moving around. and it would obviously have to be an interesting thing for the player to do...
im pretty okay with leaning into the survival side of the game, thats kinda its minor theme alongside exploration...its the thing that makes exploration kinda interesting, and kinda scary.
You could also give the informations that you get from scanning the animals to the Earth/Space Station in exchange for stuff like boots, stealth suits, ... Or they could send you new parts of your base, like a laboratory to study the minerals, or a kitchen to cook things to lure the animals. I don't know, I'm just throwing some ideas :D
hey! sorry for the long, long wait without any new stuff to show. ive been in a bit of a rut figuring out how to make the core of this game fun and ive been testing out some stuff along those ends.
the wood log stuff is just to add some light puzzley elements to the first area, because at the beginning of the game u dont really have any tools or cool things to use so i wanted to add some extra interactive stuff
the food system is one that ive wanted to add (in some form) for a little while, and its a bit more indepth. basically, i want each biome to have its own version of a foodsource, be it a fruit from a plant or a mushroom or whatever. then you can carry around this food and use it to either heal yourself (by eating it), or to give to animals. and obviously when animals are eating they arent moving, so giving food to them is a nice, friendly way to get them to let you scan them.
i still have a way to go in implementing the food system, but i think after that im gonna start lookin at adding more hazards to the game...just so the decision between eating food to heal yourself and giving it to animals becomes more of an interesting choice.
quick star surveyor update!!
i added a sit-down idle animation because...welll...i thought it would be really cute if the astronaut took a seat and observed the planet she was on if you left her to her own devices.
i also added (a little after that other gif obviously) the first draft of a background for the forest biome. im still not a fan of it, but i worked on it for a long time today and its to a point where i can be happy with it when im moving around testing other stuff. (thats the astronauts home planet in the background there)
third and final thing, that is also pretty impossible to gif--
so before the plan was to have the treetops -> forest -> caves -> swamp biomes. but because of the kind of crisis ive had recently in realizing certain parts of the game just arent fun, ive decided to scrap the cave biome and move its content to its other two neighbouring biomes. this way i can have more diverse biomes without making a whole ton of work for myself. it also works out because having some cave-specific creatures and plants exist in the forest biome means the player gets a bit of a teaser to the kinds of things they'll be able to scan when they finally get their drill ability.
hello again!
so what i really should be doing with this game is figuring out exactly how its gonna flow and if the starting area is fun, and if the fruit/wood log stuff works or is just kind of filler content.
that is what i SHOULD be doing.
what ive actually been doing is making the grapple hook much, much cooler.
now, instead of just being pulled towards it when it hits something, it can actually act like a rope and let you swing thru the treetops (u can also pull urself in by holding right-click after its been extended).
ive been wanting to figure out how to do this for a long (looonnnggg) time, so im glad i finally got around to it. BUT, im gonna go back to some actual game design stuff now :P
UPDATE
so i've gone back to figuring out what this game needs to make it as fun / interesting as i want it to be. as i was building out some initial parts of the world i kinda ran up against the fact that...im really lacking on the creatures. all my biomes need way more creatures than they currently have.
so ive started to add creatures to the flatlands, starting with...the rhino!
i think that gif explains pretty well how that rhino works. ive kinda gone back on my philosophy of 'only plants can hurt you' because if im goin to create a bunch of new creatures, i need to start removing my limitations for how to mix them up :P
the second creature ive added i havent fully designed yet. all it does right now is walk back and forth, but i wanted to show it off anyways.
i think having a bunch of differently sized creatures really gives the game variety and makes it interesting, so i went ahead and created a (maybe) friendly dinosaur :)
thats it for creatures, for now!! i think im either gonna make one more creature for this biome or start building it out more. we'll see.
in other news, the way i've been embedding gifs on this devlog is kinda hacky and probably kinda irresponsible (i basically upload a bunch of gifs on a secret itch.io game page and then copy their links) and its starting to break down so i'm gonna try and find a better way to host all these gifs in the near future...
DINO UPDATE
So, I figured out what the dino should do.
Now you can use the dino to get to higher places, and go across spiked moss and other dangers. All you gotta do is feed him some fruit!
With this I think I'm moving on from the flatlands for now. I think the dino was the missing piece of the puzzle and now I have everything I need to build a nice starting area. Gonna finish up the swamp next!
(in case you didnt notice, I also updated the tileset a little bit so it looks more natural).
UPDAAATTEE
looks like a lot of my gifs are broken. kind of a bummer. oh well!
in this weeks update (im pretending i have a scheduled update time now fyi) we have:
more water life!
you'll also notice the lamp which kinda...mostly...hovers over the players head in this gif (theres no animation for swimming and holding something yet).
so the swamp's gimmick is 'light' which originally meant your scanner got upgraded to a flashlight which you could use to explore and stuff but i found that kinda....boring? and limiting? so i replaced it with a lamp you can carry around (and throw! which isnt shown in this gif). so now you can use the light to interact with different things!
secondly, something i havent implemented yet but have been thinking about a lot lately: the logs.
from just about the beginning ive known that there has to be some sort of 'log'. at first it was just gonna be a log of all the creatures and plants youve scanned, with some hopefully funny/witty descriptions for everything that kinda showed the personality of the character
in the process of making this though i've kinda come around to a different kind of log...sort of like a daily journal thing, that would correspond with an upgrade. itd go like this: you scan a bunch of creatures, you come back, you upload the data to the ship, if you've uploaded enough for that day, the spaceship opens up, you go inside it, and your done for the day. then the screen would go black, and you'd get to read a short thing that the character has ostensibly 'written' before she went to sleep for the night. and then youd wake up, and you would have a new upgrade.
its important to note: these logs aren't gonna be just like, her accounting what she did for the day. thats not why i wanted these here. i wanted to introduce a different dimension to the game, a sort of story, but not really a story. just mostly the astronaut writing down her thoughts, her history, why she took this (dangerous, deeply lonely) mission, stuff like that. hopefully it'll be interesting and not dumb! i used to be really into writing fiction, but i havent written anything in a long long time, so we'll see :P
thats it! if you've got this far: congrats! that was ramblier than most posts!
Hello!
So updates are going to be sparser now because I've (finally) moved on from making the content, to actually arranging it in a way that is nice and makes sense and helps teach the player how to play etc. etc. Building out the world, although one of the more important things I need to do for this game, can't really be tracked using gifs.
I did make an intro for the game recently! That's the other thing I'm starting to do: actually polishing some aspects of the game that I've more or less forgotten this whole time.
