This week in the Forest! #15 (Patreon)

Man, where does the time go!

Hope y'all are staying safe if you're in that cold snap! 

Let's start off with a word from Vixel!

2/15 weekly report

New stuff:

• Added Central Forest fast travel perch. This was a bit of an undertaking because I'd always assumed just one fast travel perch per scene. (Penny lands on the 'ground perch' until the bridge is rebuilt, and the new wooden perch is across the river!)
• Finished extended scripting for new critter dates. Since the dates might randomly spawn when the dating critters ALSO need to be in the scene for certain quests, I had to code for edge cases to keep dates and quests from conflicting. (For example, if Penny drops you off at the fast travel perch, her date with Scarlett shouldn't be allowed to spawn yet. Or if Scarlett is waiting for Maverick's package in front of her house, her date shouldn't be allowed to spawn yet.)
• Added a Coming Soon label in the Gallery to help show which Act 2 sex scenes aren't available yet.
• Finished adding new conversations for gossips and gifts. The work on the quest and triggering systems I did in November really helped out here - I was able to quickly set up unlocks and prerequisites. Testing was a lil trickier because many of the new conversations are nonlinear, and some are unlocked by gossips/dates/quests. (I had to play through all of Act 2 and keep a checklist to make sure I saw each conversation appear at the expected time.)
• Integrated Scarlett's gift with the Notebook UI. Once you have her gift item, you'll see a new page in the Notebook! ^^

Noteworthy bug squashes:

• Fixed bug with chapter select / gossip UI making the wrong chapter get selected when the list scrolled past the end.
• Fixed bug causing the game to softlock when loading a savegame standing next to certain NPCs.
• Fixed bug with Ollie that would make it so you couldn't ride him anymore.
• Fixed bug that was making the New Gossip notification never show up.
• Fixed bug in Notebook causing pages to flicker when turned.

--

... What's this? Critter Gifts?!

That's the next little Mechanic/system that we've yet to reveal :> Our next build will have a few in it! So we will properly introduce it when that releases, should be pretty soon here.

DISCLAIMER! A lot of the content we've made recently is non-linear, some of it is meant to be unlocked sooner, or later, than where we are at in the story right now. I suppose all I'm saying is, things are subject to change, and what you see isn't final.

Probably obvious, but figured it was worth mentioning...

OK! Onto my side of things.

Oliver's normal idle is HUGE! So it totally didn't work for our date area! So now he's available in glorious sitting-down-mode.

I came up with a few longer-term side quests! Small but fun additional things to collect and learn about the world~ These won't be in the next build, but they do have to do with the Critter Gifts!

OH! I also made this fun banner partnering with the folks at Kincaid :>! We had a fun announcement on twitter regarding this.

I've also been prepping Maverick's Story, and the new date voted on by 10$ folks! Should have sketches for both next week's update~

That's about it for me! Other than that, just been chipping away at Finley/Rascal scene! It's coming along :>

Keep an eye out for the new builds soon!