Pumpkin Online Monthly Dev Report news

Hey guys! It's still been smooth sailing moving along in production in the New Year. We're working our hardest to get models made, animations done and systems in as soon as we can. Obviously we don't want to rush production but we still want to stay true to our deadline of having a playable Beta out by the end of the year. The countdown continues and we're still looking pretty good.

Programming

Special thanks to Jayden as usual for working is butt off for us as usual. He is the best seriously, always tackling every programming bug and obstacle we face. That being said here are the things we've been working on.

Animals and Ranching

We started working on the basic AI mechanics for the animals. Animals can wander around the farm, yet find food via their fodder or grass in the fields when they are hungry. They also will go inside on their own when the sun goes down to sleep, then wake up again and wander around on their own again. We have further work to do but, we have the basics down so far moving forward to polish up animal behaviors.

Tool durability

Tools can break over time in the game depending on a how many times you use it and random chance of damage depending on the level of tool. We have that mechanic completed where you can see a bar under the tool item to indicate damage and once it is depleted the tool is removed from the inventory. This mechanic so far is only applied to the tools, we do not plan to have durability on anything else.

Tool Equip

The player can now equip a specific tool from their inventory and do an animation corresponding to the farming. Further work will be done for the other tools as well moving forward to make it feel more complete and natural.

Furniture placement

We tweaked the furniture placement system and now a player can not only place furniture, but also pick it up and have it sent to their inventory. The furniture can also be rotated around via a key command for ease of ideal placement.

Stamina Recovery

The stamina bar is now functioning. Using a tool will deplete energy and either sleeping or eating food will restore the player's health.

Set up pop up windows

We set up pop up windows so the player can choose multiple options when necessary. Clicking on the bed will prompt the player to choose whether they want to pick it up or sleep in it.

Item Spawning

We had no good way of showing this in the video, but we completed the system for spawning items in the overworld. Depending on the item, they can be found in certain area in the world and then appear at random places for the player to pick up. They also respawn after a certain amount of time has passed at another random location. All we need to do now is assign the items we want to spawn in the over world and where.

Inventory Info

We have a small pop up window set up so when a player clicks on info on any item a description comes up. We plan on having all items have some kind of short description. Quite tedious, but for things like the crops, fish and ores we want to have a short educational/interesting fact on each item.

So a lot of little things have been worked on, but they are all coming together to make the game feel more and more complete.

Game World Development

We almost have all the buildings done for both Pumpkinvale and Wahoo Beach! We decided that Diamond Falls will not be developed for Beta, we will need to get more funding in other to complete the third town, so instead we're going to try to develop as much as possible only two towns. Next month we plan on adding in some more foliage and trees to start making the world really look alive!

Assets

We almost have all the crop assets textured and in the engine along with all their inventory information and properties. We have to polish up about 6 models and do about 15 more. However hopefully by next month we will be done with the crops and will work on getting all the fish in engine will be fun! We have well over 150 fish.

Icons

The lovely noreus is getting really close to finishing up ALL the major icons needed for the game. We plan to finish up all the icons in March and afterwards would be a few icons here and there which we may have missed. However, that would be a massive feat for us having hundreds of hundreds of items; crops, fish, herbs, flowers, animal products, all recipes, furniture, clothes etc. just all done! Last month we worked on mostly the recipes.

Animations

Andrej has been taking a break on the animations and helping us out big time on getting our character customization going. We're currently making plans and setting up the body sliders in UE4 along with the clothes as well. We don't have a date on when we can expect that yet, we're doing the research we need to make sure we do it right the first time.

We do have someone working on the animal models and animations and we hope to have all the ranching animals finished up by this month. Then hopefully we can have them textured and in engine.

Whew wow that was a lot. GOOD!

What we have lined up to work on for next month!

- More work on the Ranching
- Polishing up other systems
- More work/testing for character customization
- More Icons possibly finish them up
- Finished the crop models to completion
- Work on the animals and textures have them all in engine
- Mail out Kickstarter rewards
- Add in trees and bushes in the engine.

Thanks so much for your support!