Aug 20, 2020
Hokko Life - Lauren_Team17
What’s been happening with Hokko Life development? Here’s an update from Robert at Wonderscope Games!
As another month races by the summer fills the days with lovely sunsets, late night BBQs and lake swimming, and it's time for a new devlog about Hokko!
Expressions
I updated the Avatar's head shader to allow for expressions! With the new Avatar head mesh we set up the texturing so that details on the face would be handled with different textures; this means I can swap out a mouth or eye texture to provide different expressions. I edited the head shader this month to work with this and added three new emotions to the game: happy, straining, and winking.
Energy
I've been contemplating for a little while adding a system similar to stamina to the game. I decided to get a first implementation of this in this month to get a feel for whether or not it made sense or felt right. I gave the player an amount of energy that they consume when performing tasks like chopping down trees or mining. Once you've depleted your energy you'll need to take a short break to recharge some of it. You'll only replenish a small amount, so you'll need to grab some food or rest if you want to do a lot more work, but it will never empty completely stopping you from working altogether. I wanted to get a nice balance, rewarding players for preparing before they go off resource gathering but not penalize them if they run out of energy.
Running out of energy means you'll need to catch your breath before continuing to work
We'll see if it stays or not, but it allows me to pace the activities in the game better; gives something else you can do with farmed produce; and can add some interesting gameplay to exploring the world.
As part of this energy prototype work I added jumping to the game! This will enable you to get over small gaps in the world and consumes a bit of energy. With this I'm thinking that you will unlock ways of building structures that cross these gaps as you progress later in the game, making traversal of the world smoother. One of these structures is....
Bridges!
I added a bridge design blueprint to the game, which allows players to design their own bridges and then place them out in the world!
Placing a bridge I designed
Farming
Farming was one of the main focuses for this month, with the plan to expand a bit upon the simple base that was there already.I added fertilizer to the game; it's craftable from different resources in the world and when placed on tilled soil it will increase the chances of a crop being higher quality. High quality crops can be sold for money and are sometimes requested by characters in the game. Fertilizer will be active on a patch of soil for a set amount of time and anything planted there within that duration will have it's chances tweaked.
I added templates for two new characters to the game. One is the farmer character, who will act as your introduction to farming, and will provide you with crafting recipes for your first equipment. After you've gotten under way they'll sell you different types of seeds, and some crafting recipes for things that will make your farming life easier, such as...
Sprinklers!
I added two types of sprinkler to the game, one that waters in a ring and one that waters in a line. Once you've purchased the crafting recipe from the farmer, these can be crafted with a few resources and will make your farming life a lot easier!
The other character I added to the game will provide you with challenges for farming, requesting numbers of produce within a certain amount of time; to enable this I expanded upon the request system to allow for deadlines.
Gardening
As part of farming I added the concept of "gardening" to the game. This essentially allows you to plant flowers and trees in the world from seeds. Previously they'd grow by themselves in various locations, but the player couldn't really move them around or plant them where they wanted. Now you can dig a hole in the ground and plant seeds that will grow over time. Trees and flowers can be planted in this way, and unlike crops they don't need watering and can be dug up and moved around as they're growing (you'll need to chop down trees when they get big though!).This addition lets players have more control over their town and its appearance and allows you to set up areas for growing flowers for crafting too.
Baby plants!
UI Stuff
With the new Farmer character providing you with seeds and other items for purchase I decided to build a system in the UI for displaying more detailed information on a selected item. Seeds need to show how long they take to grow, for example, and craftable items need to show what resources they require. As this was a common requirement in a lot places in the game, I built a reusable system that I can use anywhere to display this information.
The styles are very WIP at the moment, but you can see the info panel on the right showing information about the seeds
Piece Packs
As you progress in the game you'll unlock more pieces you can use to design items with. This month I implemented what was needed for this to work and introduced something I'm calling "Piece Packs". Piece packs are collections of pieces you can use when designing and are unlocked as a bundle for a set price; I thought unlocking pieces in this way would be a lot more fun too! With Piece Packs being purchasable, I updated the Design Tool to show these packs as groups and added filter buttons allowing the player to show and hide different packs based on the materials needed.
And there we have it, all of the stuff that got done in June!
I hope you've been keeping safe and still enjoying the sunny weather.
Speak soon!
from Robert
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