Developer Diary (Maple Hills) #1 (Patreon)

Maple Hills College has received a massive amount of developer time during these past few months. That poll that was overwhelmingly on the side of returning to a walk-around map instead of a point-and-click one meant that the game needed to be redesigned from the ground up basically. New maps needed to be designed and implemented, a map for every interior location, house, room and classroom, which all needed to be first commissioned as tilesets and then placed where appropriate. Quests had to be fully redesigned as well, as they were now attached to physical NPCs on the map, instead of event time-based scripts that fired off when the time was right like in the alpha build.

However, with this much rebuilding, came a lot of innovation as well. A number of changes have been made to the original game idea, all based around the open world objective that was now set in stone. We will be revealing the new features with every Developer Diary as we're heading closer and closer to release.

- The College Grounds are now a College City. Four large districts filled with residential houses, college facilities and spare shops surround the main college building, where all the classes take place. A massive amount of new character CGs have been ordered to populate these districts, as well as dozens of major and minor side quests are in the process of being implemented. The first release of the game will only include the first of the four districts, as well as the main college building obviously, with the remaining districts getting unlocked by completing main story chapters with future updates down the line. We truly want the city to feel alive and full with content to do, thus the decision to take one district at the time. We still are a small dev team afterall.

That's all for this week. Stay tuned for next week's diary, where we'll expand on the new combat and enemy systems that have been implemented for the game!

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